Feminist Philosophy of Mind

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND SERIES

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Susanna Siegel Feminist Philosophy of Mind
Edited by Keya Maitra and
Consciousness and the Prospects
Jennifer McWeeny
of Physicalism
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Feminist Philosophy
of Mind
Edited by
K EYA M A I T R A A N D J E N N I F E R M C W E E N Y
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Names: Maitra, Keya, editor. | McWeeny, Jennifer, editor.
Title: Feminist philosophy of mind / edited by Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny.
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 Contents

Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction: What Is Feminist Philosophy of Mind?  1

Jennifer McWeeny and Keya Maitra

PA RT I . M I N D A N D G E N D E R & R AC E &

1. Is the First-​Person Perspective Gendered?  41

Lynne Rudder Baker
2. Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference: The Sexed
Presuppositions Underlying the Turing Test  54
Amy Kind
3. Toward a Feminist Theory of Mental Content  70
Keya Maitra
4. Disappearing Black People through Failures of White Empathy  86
Janine Jones

PA RT I I . SE L F A N D SE LV E S

5. Playfulness, “World”-​Traveling, and Loving Perception  105

María Lugones
6. Symptoms in Particular: Feminism and the Disordered Mind  123
Jennifer Radden
7. Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self: Reflections
on the Views of Soran Reader and Sarah Buss  139
Diana Tietjens Meyers
8. The Question of Personal Identity  156
Susan James

PA RT I I I . NAT U R A L I SM A N D N O R M AT I V I T Y

9. Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist

Critique of Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception  175
Judith Butler
vi Contents

10. Enactivism and Gender Performativity  190

Ashby Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie
11. Norms and Neuroscience: The Case of Borderline Personality
Disorder  207
Anne J. Jacobson
12. Embodiments of Sex and Gender: The Metaphors of Speaking
Surfaces  221
Gabrielle Benette Jackson

PA RT I V. B O DY A N D M I N D

13. Against Physicalism  239

Naomi Scheman
14. Why Feminists Should Be Materialists and Vice Versa  255
Paula Droege
15. Which Bodies Have Minds? Feminism, Panpsychism, and the
Attribution Question  272
Jennifer McWeeny
16. Sexual Orientations: The Desire View  294
E. Díaz-​León

PA RT V. M E M O RY A N D E M O T IO N

17. Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity  313

Susan J. Brison
18. Does Neutral Monism Provide the Best Framework for
Relational Memory?  330
Iva Apostolova
19. The Odd Case of a Bird-​Mother: Relational Selfhood and a
“Method of Grief ”  346
Vrinda Dalmiya
20. Equanimity and the Loving Eye: A Buddhist-​Feminist
Account of Loving Attention  362
Emily McRae

Contributors  379
Index  383
 Acknowledgments

A collection of essays on feminist philosophy of mind is long overdue in the

discipline. We would not have been able to realize this vision without the col-
laboration, encouragement, and enthusiasm of so many who welcomed the
inauguration of this subfield and the expansion of philosophy by centering con-
siderations of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, ability, and other social and ex-
periential categories. Completing this manuscript during a global pandemic at
a time when diverse social movements are gaining ground, changing the world,
and raising consciousness—​waking people up to our widespread participation
in systemic injustices and the social structures on which they depend—​makes
this project even more meaningful. The consideration and discussion of the
ways that theories about the nature of mind may support or undermine social
movements and the voices and experiences of groups of people at the center of
these movements are part and parcel of the sea change that is upon us. Such a
project is necessarily a collective one, and we wish to recognize those whose par-
ticipation was crucial along the way.
We would first like to thank our respective institutions for supporting our
research on this project: University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) and
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The University Research Council and
Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professorship for the Humanities at UNCA
and the Dean of Arts and Sciences and Department of Humanities and Arts at
WPI provided financial support. We are especially appreciative of colleagues
Melissa Burchard, Ameena Batada, Tracey Rizzo, Wiebke Strehl, and Kate Zubko
at UNCA and Jean King, Kate Moncrief, Kris Boudreau, Michelle Ephraim,
Roger Gottlieb, Peter Hansen, John Sanbonmatsu, and Ruth Smith at WPI. In
addition, many colleagues and friends from the profession have been generous
and consistent with their willingness to engage our ideas in conversations over
the years. Thank you to Iva Apostolova, Donald Baxter, Nancy Bauer, Asha
Bhandary, Ashby Butnor, Arindam Chakrabarti, Vrinda Dalmiya, PJ DiPietro,
Paula Droege, Michael Eng, Jay Garfield, Nicole Garner, Mark Johnson, Janine
Jones, Noreen Khawaja, Amy Kind, Matt MacKenzie, Emily McRae, Diana
Meyers, Dermot Moran, James Morley, Ruth Millikan, Shelley Park, Shireen
Roshanravan, Brook Sadler, Naomi Scheman, Susanna Siegel, Margaret A. “Peg”
Simons, Elisa Springer, Evan Thompson, Gail Weiss, Naomi Zack, and Kelli
Zaytoun.
viii Acknowledgments

We developed the idea for this project while attending the 2012 National
Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute “Investigating
Consciousness: Buddhist and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives.”
Christian Coseru, Jay Garfield, and Evan Thompson were the directors of the in-
stitute, where we benefited from many stimulating conversations with faculty
and the other participants across multiple philosophical traditions. When this
book was in its early stages, the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical
Association invited us to participate in a symposium, “Feminism and Philosophy,”
on the theme of feminist philosophy of mind, which took place on April 13, 2017,
in Seattle, Washington. We are grateful for exchanges with the other panelists in
that session, Janine Jones and Amy Kind, and moderator Helen Daly, and for the
questions we received from members of the audience, whose enthusiasm for and
careful consideration of the subject inspired directions that we pursue in the book.
We presented versions of our own chapters in this book at a number of
venues, including the Florida Philosophical Association Annual conference in
2016, where Keya gave a keynote address; the Center for Subjectivity Research
in Copenhagen; WoGAP (Workshop on Gender and Philosophy) at MIT; and
the Colorado College Philosophy Department Colloquium Series, where Jen
delivered lectures. We thank these programs for their hospitality and interest
in the subject and the audience members for their insightful comments.
The task of writing the introduction to this book, which defines the scope,
content, and history of this new subfield in philosophy, was challenging and re-
quired many conversations and revisions. We are lucky to have colleagues who
were giving with their time and provided comments on various drafts of the
introduction and our individual chapters. Their incisive readings helped us to
develop and refine our vision for the book. We are especially grateful to Ashby
Butnor, Arindam Chakrabarti, David Chalmers, Vrinda Dalmiya, Paula Droege,
Jay Garfield, Janine Jones, Amy Kind, Matt MacKenzie, Naomi Scheman, and
Anand Vaidya.
Our editors at Oxford University Press believed in the project from the start
and ushered us through each stage of the process with care and sage advice.
David Chalmers, editor of the Philosophy of Mind series, could always be leaned
upon for guidance and inspiration. Executive Editor Peter Ohlin, Assistant
Editors Abigail Johnson and Brent Matheny, and Senior Production Editor Leslie
Johnson were a pleasure to work with and provided counsel throughout devel-
opment and production. We are grateful to the Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York /​VEGAP, Madrid for granting us permission to feature Remedios
Varo’s painting Alegoría del inverno (Allegory of Winter) on the book’s cover, and
to Rachel Perkins for her stunning cover design. We would also like to thank
our production managers, Nandhini Thanga Alagu and Kavitha Yuvaraj, our
 Acknowledgments ix

copyeditors, Richard Isomaki and Janani Vadivelou, and David Martinez, who
meticulously prepared the book’s index.
This book is a manifestation of the collective efforts of each of its twenty-​one
contributors, who brought their unique perspectives and careful thinking to this
project. We thank them for their hard work, expertise, and patience throughout
the long editing process, and we are honored to be in their company, sharing
the pages of this inaugural collection. Susan J. Brison, Judith Butler, Susan
James, María Lugones, and Naomi Scheman kindly agreed to our requests to re-
print previously published articles. We are appreciative of Princeton University
Press, Jeffner Allen, Cambridge University Press, and Rowman & Littlefield for
granting the permission rights to reprint their chapters here.
While preparing this manuscript we have experienced invaluable philosoph-
ical, professional, and personal growth. We thank our families for their unwa-
vering support in getting us to this point. Keya thanks Mohsin, Abir, baba, bordi,
chhordi, Dipakda, Tukun, and Rupun, and members of her Asheville family,
Julia Noe, Amy Monroe, Peggy Brooks, Norma Jean Snyder, and Jennifer Fulford
for always being there for her. Jen is grateful for her parents, family, and friends,
including Emily Stowe, Ashby Butnor, Matt MacKenzie, Quinn MacKenzie, Reid
MacKenzie, Sally Wurtzler, Maura McGee, Claudia Tomsa, Matt Allen, and Ture
Turnbull.
Finally, and sadly, two of the book’s contributing authors passed away be-
fore this book appeared in print. Lynne Rudder Baker and María Lugones have
each made unparalleled contributions to the discipline of philosophy and will
be deeply missed by so many of us. Baker is known for her work in philosophy
of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion, where her emphases on per-
sonhood and the first-​person perspective show philosophy’s relevance to the
world we live in. To our knowledge, c­ hapter 1 of this book, “Is the First-​Person
Perspective Gendered?,” is the last article that Baker published, and it is one that
promises to open a lasting debate on the subject. Lugones is a renowned theo-
rist of coalition, feminism, Women of Color politics, the oppressing ↔ resisting
relation, and friendship. Her writings have played a crucial role within the dis-
cipline of philosophy and beyond in antiracist, decolonial, and feminist social
movements. Her most famous article, “Playfulness, ‘World’-​ Traveling, and
Loving Perception,” reprinted here as c­ hapter 5, is exemplary both for its theoret-
ical innovation and for its autobiographical honesty. We are extremely grateful
to be able to feature the work of these two special and irreplaceable thinkers in
Feminist Philosophy of Mind and extend their legacies in new directions.
 Introduction
What Is Feminist Philosophy of Mind?
Jennifer McWeeny and Keya Maitra

We first conceived of a book that would put feminist philosophy in conversa-

tion with philosophy of mind while attending the 2012 National Endowment for
Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute “Investigating Consciousness: Buddhist
and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives.” The Institute was premised on
the idea that the philosophical study of consciousness is furthered by employing
resources from diverse disciplines such as cognitive science, phenomenology,
analytic philosophy, and Buddhist studies.1 As philosophers of mind trained
by thinkers who were early advocates for interdisciplinarity (Mark Johnson
and Ruth Millikan, respectively), we were delighted to see our field approached
through these cross-​cultural and cross-​disciplinary engagements, and we dis-
covered that the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives on consciousness was fe-
cund for our own work, as did many of the Institute’s other participants.
At the same time that we were inspired by the Institute’s approach to phi-
losophy of mind, as feminist philosophers who work with women of color
feminisms and as women situated in postcolonial matrixes (albeit in different
ways), we were struck by the conspicuous absence of a prominent feminist or
critical social perspective among the Institute’s faculty members and readings.
Even in a philosophical space that we found to be one of the more inclusive and
interdisciplinary we had yet experienced, there were few opportunities for rig-
orous analysis of feminist perspectives. “Feminist philosophy” is an umbrella
concept that holds together multiple manners of doing philosophy that share
the following feature: they regard the voices and experiences of women and
members of underrepresented groups such as people of color, LGBTQ individ-
uals, working-​class people, and people with disabilities as philosophically signif-
icant.2 Because this regard is not proportionally distributed across these groups
in individual instances of feminist philosophy, and because such approaches
span diverse motivations and literatures, the plural form, feminist philosophies,
is more apt to describe this type of work.3
Noticing the absence of feminist philosophies at the NEH Summer Institute,
and the corollary tendency on the part of discussants to talk about minds in the

Jennifer McWeeny and Keya Maitra, Introduction In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and
Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0001
2 Introduction

abstract as “the [universal] mind” rather than “this [particular person’s] mind” or
“my, your, his, her, or their mind,” generated a series of provocative questions that
ultimately led to the present study: Would contemporary debates in philosophy
of mind be furthered by taking note of feminist insights? Would feminist philo-
sophical projects benefit from employing theories and vocabularies from philos-
ophy of mind? Would new philosophical questions, topics, and phenomena be
revealed by an integration of the two fields? This book demonstrates affirmative
answers to these questions by featuring twenty essays that combine insights from
feminist philosophies and philosophies of mind.
Philosophy of mind is that subfield of philosophy that seeks to answer the
question “What is the mind?” (Chalmers 2002, xi).4 Philosophers of mind look
for identifying features of the mind—​features that are shared among minds and
are therefore universal. They ask what conditions a thing must fulfill in order
for it to be a mind (or a particular component of minds such as consciousness
or memory), and they frequently employ thought experiments, conceivability
problems, and appeals to empirical data to reveal these conditions in fine-​
grained ways.5 This focus has resulted in careful accounts of events and episodes
of minds such as thoughts, desires, and dreams; contents of minds such as beliefs
and feelings; functions of minds such as perception, attention, imagination, and
emotion; and properties of minds such as intentionality, consciousness, and in-
telligence.6 Explanations of mind-​body interaction, mind-​world interaction,
self-​knowledge, and knowledge of other minds have been central preoccupa-
tions of the field and have led to the development of a number of its prominent
views, including dualism, physicalism, functionalism, individualism, exter-
nalism, enactivism, and many others.
Although they rarely use the same vocabularies as philosophers of mind, fem-
inist philosophers have written extensively on the natures of consciousness, the
self, personal identity, and agency, and have attended to differential experiences
of these phenomena across social groups.7 Analyses of the roles of first-​person
and third-​person perspectives in the constitution of self-​consciousness in op-
pressive contexts have played an important part in feminist, critical race, and
trans studies, as has the question of whether the self is unitary or plural.8 Scholars
have also considered whether cognitive science, and in particular neuroscience,
can explain phenomena such as sex, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as
illnesses that predominantly affect women.9 Critical social theorists have devel-
oped original theories of emotion, reason, memory, perception, imagination,
belief, and desire that attend to the social and relational nature of these mental
phenomena.10 In addition, they have crafted alternative ontologies and accounts
of mind-​body relations that grow from unique criticisms of naturalism, physi-
calism, and dualism that are not readily voiced in philosophy of mind.11 Many
of these feminist views foreground the context and particularity of minds. They
 Introduction 3

follow from asking questions such as “Whose mind is the model for the theory?”
and “Are some groups of people attributed minds (or certain mental capacities)
more readily than others?”
Studies of mental phenomena undertaken by feminists bring new perspectives
to standard accounts in philosophy of mind, just as advancements in philos-
ophy of mind offer important resources to feminist philosophers. For example,
the vocabularies of philosophy of mind can be useful when describing the ways
that oppression takes root in thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotions. Naomi
Scheman’s classic paper “Individualism and the Objects of Psychology” offers a
paradigmatic example of this approach (Scheman 1983). Here Scheman argues
against “individualism,” or the idea that factors internal to an individual alone
produce the meaning and content of mental phenomena. She expands upon
criticisms of individualism expressed by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge in order
to reveal an original theory of mental content that sees beliefs and desires as
social and relational phenomena, and that implicates a method for cultivating
liberatory rather than oppressive beliefs and desires in a population (Putnam
1975a; Burge 1979).
Ned Block’s article “Sexism, Racism, Ageism, and the Nature of Consciousness”
indicates the benefits of dialogue between feminist philosophy and philos-
ophy of mind in a different way and thus serves as another precursor to the field
(Block 1999). Block presents a critique of representationism, the view that the
phenomenal character of an experience is captured fully in its representational
content, by emphasizing variations in color vision across populations demar-
cated by gender, race, and age. This paper demonstrates how thinking about the
particularity of minds in relation to social categories can contribute to ongoing
debates in philosophy of mind. Similarly, a number of topics that have recently
gained attention in philosophy of mind, such as embodiment, social cognition,
the extended mind, enactivism, externalism, mindreading, empathy, and cross-​
cultural approaches highlight the context and particularity of minds, and thus
dovetail with feminist projects.12

Defining Feminist Philosophy of Mind

Feminist philosophy of mind is an area of study that investigates the nature of

mind with reference to social locations marked by categories such as gender,
race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability, and/​or investigates the nature
of social locations with reference to theories about the mind.13 Although this
emerging field grows from seeds of its parent disciplines and speaks to their cen-
tral debates, it is ultimately distinct from them because it takes the three focal
questions already mentioned—​What is the mind? Whose mind is the model for
4 Introduction

the theory? To whom is mind attributed?—​and treats them collectively rather

than separately.
Asking “Whose mind?” and “To whom is mind attributed?” alongside “What
is the mind?” brings much complexity to theorizing about the mind, as recent
attention to topics such as artificial intelligence, animal cognition, and panpsy-
chism has shown. Conceiving of “Whose?” and “To whom?” not only in terms
of species categories such as humans, bats, and machines, but also intraspecies
categories delineated by gender, race, class, and so on, likewise promises to bring
further innovation. The interrogative triad of What? Whose? and To whom?
forms a method for investigating the mind that invites theorists to think beyond
their own perspectives and discourages them from confusing their own socially
and culturally situated views and disciplinary intuitions with universal human
experiences. This is a method attentive to the philosophical consequences of as-
suming third-​person perspectives when studying the minds and bodies of others,
and of subsuming the first-​personal perspectives of others under our own.
Alternating between these frames of What? Whose? and To whom?, feminist
philosophy of mind does not prematurely foreclose the questions of whether
minds are uniform across beings and groups of beings, and of when and whether
sameness or difference among distinct minds should be prioritized in our the-
orizing about the mind. It welcomes the expertise that comes with disciplinary
and subdisciplinary specializations in a particular area while also questioning
the habitual assumptions and conventional practices that accompany such
specializations. This field is born of the conviction that considering multiple
perspectives and methods together will generate more nuanced understandings
of the mind and its various components than would otherwise be possible.
The differences between the three guiding questions at the center of fem-
inist philosophy of mind are aptly illustrated by the following foundational
claims in the history of philosophy: René Descartes’s “I am. I exist . . . as long as
I am thinking” (1984, 19); Simone de Beauvoir’s “I am a woman” (2010, 5); and
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” (Gage 2005, 104).14 It does not seem to us
a coincidence that these claims are respectively associated with distinct social
locations and philosophical literatures.
For Descartes, his certainty in his own experience of thinking demonstrates
that mind is immaterial and therefore distinct from the body (and, by implica-
tion, his sex); it is defined by its action, thought, which in turn is a hallmark of the
human. Notably, Descartes’s experience also implicates an individuated mind,
one that is essentially private and bounded rather than social and relational.
On the contrary, Beauvoir’s social location is inescapably primary in her expe-
rience.15 Noting the difference between a man’s relation to his sex and her own,
she explains, “If I want to define myself, I first have to say ‘I am a woman’; all other
assertions will arise from this basic truth” (2009, 5). The concept “woman” must
 Introduction 5

therefore be analyzed philosophically in order for Beauvoir to have the same cer-
tainty in her first-​personal experience as Descartes does, before she can theorize
about consciousness and the mind in the style of her countrymen, Descartes,
Jean-​Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty. Her skepticism is about the in-
ternal world rather than the external one, and about the integrity of her own
experience when it has been shaped in contexts of sexist and economic oppres-
sion. The divergence between third-​person and first-​person accounts of wom-
anhood that Beauvoir respectively chronicles in the two volumes of The Second
Sex, “Facts and Myths” and “Lived Experience,” shows the importance of asking
“Whose mind is the model for the theory?” and, another variation of the “whose”
question: “Whose theory is modeling the mind?”
Sojourner Truth’s call, “Ain’t I a woman?” begins at a different place still. Bell
hooks’s interpretation of Truth’s sentiment emphasizes that the dictates of racism
and sexism establish Black men as representative of Black people and White
women as representative of women, thus discounting the lived experiences of
Black women.16 In this context, Truth’s status as both a human and a woman is al-
ways in question, rendering invisible or irrelevant her first-​personal experiences,
her subjectivity, and her mind: “In the eyes of the 19th century white public, the
black female was mere chattel, a thing, an animal” (hooks 1981, 159). Rather
than begin with a statement or proposition that is self-​evident and self-​certain
like those of Descartes and Beauvoir, Truth’s experiential starting point is inter-
rogative. She asks why what is self-​evident to her is not self-​evident to others;
her skepticism is fueled by this irrational discrepancy in attitudes toward her
own existence. Hooks’s analysis stresses that even feminist theorizing that
foregrounds the particularity of social locations can repeat the mistake of con-
fusing the experiences of certain individuals—​White, bourgeois women, for
example—​with those of all individuals in the group “women,” a criticism that has
often been levied against Beauvoir (hooks 1981, 7).17 Such moves evade the fact
that a long-​standing justificatory strategy of oppressions has been to attribute
mind differentially—​to code racial and cultural Others as either mentally defi-
cient (“primitive”) or altogether lacking a mind in the Cartesian or Kantian sense
(“animal” or “bestial”).18 Concepts of mind inevitably tally with this social his-
tory: the “primitive” helps define the “rational”; what is “animal” helps to de-
fine what is “human”; beings who are seen as “uncivilized” help to define what a
“woman” is (hooks 1981; Spillers 1987; Oyěwùmí 1997; Lugones 2007).
At the same time that we characterize feminist philosophy of mind as a field
that considers the What? Whose? and To whom? questions about mind collec-
tively, we also recognize that these questions are interpreted in different ways
and engaged in varying degrees across individual instances of the category,
as the diversity among the chapters in this collection attests. Nonetheless, the
twenty chapters in Feminist Philosophy of Mind reveal five predominant themes
6 Introduction

for this new philosophical area that are respectively detailed in each of the
book’s parts: “Mind and Gender&Race&,” “Self and Selves,” “Naturalism and
Normativity,” “Body and Mind,” and “Memory and Emotion.”19
We chose these themes for this inaugural collection because, with the excep-
tion of the first one, they already populate the literatures of both feminist philos-
ophy and philosophy of mind. The first chapter of parts II–​V therefore consists in
a reprint of a classic article that has in some way set the stage for current research
on these topics. Further, representing each theme with a paired set of terms
rather than one term evokes the different histories and emphases of feminist phi-
losophy and philosophy of mind and raises crucial questions of interaction and
integration between the terms. What is the relationship, if any, between mind
and gender&race&? The self and other selves? Naturalistic explanations and nor-
mative standards? Bodies and minds? One faculty of mind such as memory and
another such as emotion? In what follows, we trace how and why each of these
subjects has come to be a central thematic for feminist philosophy of mind with
reference to the existing literature in its parent fields and discuss the original
interventions that this book makes to contemporary debates.

Part I: Mind and Gender&Race&

Folk understandings of mind often suggest that minds are gendered and raced
like people are; they can be classified into different types that mirror gender-​
categories or race-​categories.20 For example, Louann Brizendine’s bestseller The
Female Brain attributes personality differences between men and women to hor-
monal fluctuations that effect differences between the groups’ respective brain
structures (Brizendine 2006). Brizendine claims that women may be better at
expressing emotions and remembering events because the hippocampus in the
female brain is larger than it is in the male brain (Brizendine 2006, 5). The male
brain, for its part, has a larger amygdala and “two and a half times the brain space
devoted to sexual drive” (Brizendine 2006, 5). Studies undertaken from a fem-
inist perspective frequently argue that minds are gendered from the other di-
rection: it is not that biological differences in brain structure produce gendered
minds, but that society and culture act differently on minds in ways that even-
tually yield different ways of perceiving, reasoning, feeling, and thinking be-
tween men and women, including different ways of conceiving of what mind is
(Gilligan 1982; Belenky et al. 1986).
Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man famously details how widespread
social and cultural biases have shaped purportedly scientific claims about dif-
ferential capacities for intelligence and cognitive function among different races
(Gould 1981).21 Whether appealing to biological factors or cultural influences, a
 Introduction 7

number of recent book titles continue to reflect concepts of raced and racialized
minds. These include The Chinese Mind (De Mente 2009), The Indian Mind
(Moore 1967), The Black Mind (Dathorne 1974), The African Mind (Chinweizu
1987), The Crisis of the European Mind (Hazard 2013), and For Indigenous Minds
Only (Waziyatawin and Yellowbird 2012). Everyday language also implies that
in folk psychology minds are tied to other identity categories such as class, sexu-
ality, and ability. Claims such as “That’s how poor people think” or “Gay men are
more emotional than straight men” repeat this tendency to see minds as person-
alized in ways that mirror features of social identities.
In contrast to these popular ideas about minds, philosophers of mind more
often than not presume that minds are not the kinds of things that are influenced
by gender, race, culture, and society in constitutive or structural ways, though
they may admit that minds may be gendered or raced contingently in terms of
their content.22 Even recent work that considers the embodied, embedded, en-
active, extended, and social components of cognition rarely conceives of embod-
iment or socialization in terms of gender or race. This trend may be linked to a
presumption that whatever it is that makes a mind a mind is likely to be gender-​
and race-​neutral. It may also reflect a political fear of making space for discrim-
inatory claims that would suggest that women and people of color have different
mental capacities than men and White people.
Though not usually referenced in the philosophy of mind literature, W. E. B.
Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness presents what is likely the most formi-
dable challenge to the idea that mental structure is universal among different so-
cial groups. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois writes that Black people living in
a racist world lack a true self-​consciousness (Du Bois 1903, 3). Instead, they pos-
sess a “double consciousness,” which he defines as “a sense of always looking at
oneself through the eyes of others” (Du Bois 1903, 3).23 This description suggests
that oppression can alter the very structure of an individual’s consciousness to
the point where a third-​person perspective eclipses the first-​person perspec-
tive.24 Frantz Fanon’s well-​known criticism of Sartre’s theory of consciousness
makes the point emphatically: “ontology does not allow us to understand the
being of the black man” (Fanon 2008, 90). Moreover, double consciousness
afflicts all Black people in a racist world (and arguably all marginalized people),
and so it is a broader and different phenomenon than mental “disorders” such as
dissociative identity.
Each chapter in part I brings questions about the connections between social
location and mental architecture out from the margins of the field and sows seeds
for a vibrant contemporary debate. Are minds gendered in terms of their con-
tent, their structure, or not at all? At what point specifically (or in which faculty/​
capacity) do factors like gender, race, class, sexuality, culture, social context, and
ability become relevant to investigations into the nature of mind? Is gender only
8 Introduction

a matter of third-​person ascription, or does it live in first-​personal structures of

a consciousness? Do our ways of conceiving of mental properties such as intelli-
gence reflect our ways of conceiving of social or physical properties such as sex
and race? How does recognizing the differential attribution of mind across racial
groups affect our understanding of the problem of other minds?
Chapter 1, by Lynne Rudder Baker, enters this conversation with a careful
consideration of the first-​person perspective, or the capacity to “conceive of one-
self as oneself in the first-​person.” In “Is the First-​Person Perspective Gendered?”
she argues that although the first-​person perspective may be de facto gendered
within certain cultural contexts, it is not gendered de jure. Even though language
is embedded with ideas about gender and the first-​person perspective requires
language, Baker suggests that gender identity is formed only after the first-​person
perspective has already been established. Contrary to thinkers who would claim
that this aspect of mental structure is necessarily gendered, Baker claims that it is
only contingently so.
In ­chapter 2, “Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference: The Sexed
Presuppositions Underlying the Turing Test,” Amy Kind argues that our
standard ways of conceiving of the attributes of thought and intelligence are im-
plicitly modeled on how we understand the attribute of sex. Kind’s discussion
reminds us of an oft-​forgotten element of the Turing test; namely, that the orig-
inal Imitation Game involves convincing a neutral questioner that a man is a
woman. Kind concludes that our tendencies to think about intelligence as an all-​
or-​nothing affair and to value superficial markers of intelligence are related to
the way sex attributes were conceived in the mid-​twentieth century.
Keya Maitra’s contribution, ­chapter 3, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Mental
Content,” shows that the feminist emphasis on the experiences of women and
other underrepresented groups pushes in the direction of content externalism.
While most externalist theories fail to account for the roles of social organiza-
tion and social power in the production of mental content, Maitra argues that
Millikan’s teleosemantic theory offers a promising foundation. A feminist theory
of content allows us to appreciate the nuanced role that historical and sociocul-
tural forces play in shaping the content of our languages and minds.
In ­chapter 4, “Disappearing Black People through Failures of White Empathy,”
Janine Jones reveals a difficulty with the classic problem of other minds: namely,
if racism entails that Black people are not recognized as having minds in the first
place, or are recognized as having “attenuated” minds in comparison with White
people, then empathy between members of the two groups cannot proceed as
it would in a context where they are equally attributed minds. Jones argues that
the construction of Black people’s minds in Manichaean opposition to that of
White people’s renders White empathy for Black people improbable, and that
therefore self-​empathy on the part of White people is a more productive project
 Introduction 9

for countering racism. Jones’s theory of empathy thus departs from models that
rely solely on the self ’s positive perceptions, memories, and imagination, and
includes what the self could not have perceived, remembered, or imagined in
experience.
From these summaries, we see how jointly engaging the questions of What?
Whose? and To whom? leads to new insights. The chapters in part I answer
“What is the mind?” by respectively proposing theories of the first-​person per-
spective, intelligence, mental content, and other minds. They do so largely by
asking “Whose mind?”—​by considering these aspects of minds in relation to dif-
ferent groups of people, including women and men, immigrants and citizens,
and Black people and White people. The question “To whom is mind attributed?”
(and the variation “How is mind attributed?”) is crucial to Kind’s explanation of
how we think of the property of intelligence as a property akin to sex discussed
in ­chapter 2, and to Jones’s development of the multidimensional description of
empathy offered in ­chapter 4. Moreover, in ­chapter 3, Maitra suggests that the
analysis of mental content is furthered by looking at whose content it is, that is,
the social and historical context that shapes content over time and that grounds
the meaning of concepts such as “whiteness.”

Part II: Self and Selves

Whereas the chapters in part I consider a range of mental phenomena in light of

social location, those in part II discuss the self in particular, addressing questions
about the ontology of the self, self-​consciousness, agency, and personal identity.
This theme in philosophy of mind has been attended to by feminist philosophers
more so than any other and so it is fitting that it be addressed after the introduc-
tory chapters illuminating certain relationships between mind and the social cat-
egories of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality.
In the existing literature on the self, feminist philosophers have explored
a wide variety of topics, including how experiences of self and agency are
influenced by sexism, racism, and other traumas (Anzaldúa 1999; Brison
2003; Alcoff 2011); how boundaries between one’s self and others may be-
come confused in relationships of care and dependence (Kittay 1999; Meyers
2014; Dalmiya 2017); how a woman’s consciousness of her self affects
her possibilities for liberation (Butnor 2011; Fatima 2012; Maitra 2014;
Leboeuf 2018); how agency and autonomy are structured in oppressive situ-
ations (Veltman and Piper 2014; Herr 2018); and how studies of oppressed
consciousnesses like those described by Du Bois and Beauvoir often prior-
itize a self ’s inherent multiplicity or plurality over its unity (Barvosa 2008;
Ortega 2016; McWeeny 2017).
10 Introduction

By contrast, philosophy of mind’s engagement with the question of self has

largely come through one particular lens, namely, the lens of personal iden-
tity, which may be a marginal topic in the field due to its association with met-
aphysics. The question of personal identity considers which mental structures
make a person the same person from one moment to the next and what unites
diverse experiences together into one consciousness. Philosophers of mind
have recognized a variety of phenomena as central to identity and conscious-
ness, from memory (Locke 1996), to causal dependence (Shoemaker 1984), to
the first-​person perspective (Zahavi 2005; Baker 2013; Ganeri 2012), a lack of
first-​personal perspective (Albahari 2007, 2009), a feeling of ownership or in-
timacy (de Vignemont 2007), and the self-​reflective character of consciousness
(MacKenzie 2015). They have also questioned whether an enduring self or ego
exists at all beyond the flow of consciousness, and sought to explicate the rela-
tionship between agency and personal identity.25
Ian Hacking, who is known for emphasizing the importance of social context
in his work in philosophy of science, ironically suggests that examples involving
dissociative identity disorder, for instance, do not undermine the unity of con-
sciousness because the central question of personal identity is not “who I am, but
what I am” (Hacking 1995, 221; emphasis added). As long as the “what” of self
is universal, philosophers need not bother with experiences of discontinuity or
multiplicity implicated by “who” one is.26 When discontinuity and fragmentation
of the self is acknowledged in philosophy of mind, this is often taken to signal the
existence of a different self rather than plurality and contradiction within one self
(Nagel 1971; Lewis 1976). For example, even though Galen Strawson’s book on
the self is titled Selves, he nonetheless stresses that “the idea of any such experi-
ence of separate interests [multiple points of view in one self] is unimaginable
and bewildering. . . . I find it hard to believe that anyone really has such experi-
ence” (Strawson 2009, 16).
Contrary to Hacking’s claim, feminist theory often begins with the idea that
the “who” of self is inextricable from the “what” of self, and that therefore the
possibility of a plural self is an empirical and phenomenological question, not
merely a logical one (Radden 2011). For this reason, feminists have generally
preferred to analyze real-​life, concrete examples of fractured or multiple selves in
contexts of oppression, trauma, and human rights abuses rather than hypothet-
ical thought experiments.27 Further, feminists frequently understand the self to
be both “embodied” and “relational”—​constitutively linked to the body and con-
stitutively dependent on its relations to others.
The four chapters in part II engage questions about the self ’s relationality and
embodiment and, in so doing, significantly extend theorizing about the self in
philosophy of mind. How is the self affected by its social context and the particu-
larity of the body to which it is tied? Is a person’s sense of self or self-​consciousness
 Introduction 11

gendered, raced, classed, or otherwise marked by social location? Is the self sin-
gular or plural? To what extent is agency facilitated or hindered by one’s gender
and race? Does taking account of social location affect the ways that we think
about the continuity of self over time?
In ­chapter 5, “Playfulness, ‘World’-​Traveling, and Loving Perception,” first
published in 1987, María Lugones articulates her landmark notion of “ ‘world’-​
traveling.” “World”-​traveling involves traversing oppressive social structures,
such as when one moves between communities where one is respectively seen
with and without racist perceptions. In such cases, it seems that the same person
is capable of possessing two contradictory properties at the same time: playful-
ness and seriousness. Lugones explains how this is possible by arguing that prop-
erties of self are world-​dependent, and that, contrary to how the self has generally
been conceived in the history of philosophy, the self is actually “a plurality of
selves” insofar as it is keyed into a plurality of “worlds” or social structures.
Chapter 6, “Symptoms in Particular: Feminism and the Disordered Mind,”
offers a critique of unitary, ahistorical, and reductive accounts of self. Here
Jennifer Radden presents a theory of mental disorder that reconsiders the role
symptoms play in medical and cognitivist models of mind. Instead of treating
symptoms as mere downstream effects of brain dysfunction, she takes them as
moments of voiced distress of a self embedded in a particular network of social
relationships. The first-​person experience of the sufferer thus becomes decisive
for articulating the nature of the disorder and its diagnostic process, as well as for
understanding at which point multiplicity becomes a sign of disorder.
Presumptions of agency and activity often follow from the idea of a free-​
standing, unitary self. Challenging this presumption, recent feminist accounts
have valorized the roles of passivity and relational receptivity in autonomy,
maintaining that these features are just as important as activity and agency.
Diana Tietjens Meyers’s essay, ­chapter 7, “Passivity in Theories of the Agentic
Self: Reflections on the Views of Soran Reader and Sarah Buss,” reveals why such
approaches are problematic and emphasizes the roles of interactivity and ca-
pacity over and above passivity in establishing relational forms of agency. When
dependency is understood in terms of capacities rather than passivity, respect for
the agency of victims of human rights abuses is not compromised.
In “The Question of Personal Identity,” c­ hapter 8, Susan James criticizes an-
alytic accounts of personal identity that too hastily embrace the hierarchical
and gendered opposition between mind and body. According to these views,
personhood and its survival are treated as a matter of psychological continuity,
that is, continuity of psychological states such as desires, intentions, beliefs, and
memory, and bodily continuity (or discontinuity) remains irrelevant. Drawing
from feminist research on memories of bodily trauma including Susan J. Brison’s
pathbreaking work featured in ­chapter 17, James points out that although in
12 Introduction

such cases psychological unity can be shattered, it can also be restored through
practices of bodily respect and recognition by others.
Part II shows us how the recognition of feminist philosophy of mind’s core
triad of questions advances existing debates and theories about personal identity
and selfhood. Lugones’s response to the What? question is an original account of
identity—​the self is a “plurality of selves”—​that she develops by attending to the
To whom? question: she examines the differential attribution of properties such
as playfulness across diverse national and social contexts. In a similar fashion,
Radden’s and James’s analyses center the consideration of women’s minds (the
Whose? question) in order to get at the “What?” of mental disorder and bodily
continuity in ways that recognize women’s experiences of their own selves.
Meyers’s theory of agency is likewise dependent on thinking about agency in the
context of human rights abuses, thus taking up the questions of “Whose agency?”
and “To whom is agency attributed?”

Part III: Naturalism and Normativity

The preceding two parts raise questions about the relationship between social
location and certain types of mental phenomena. Part III shifts our focus to the
mind’s embodiment and, in particular, how best to conceive of the brain and the
rest of the physical body in our theories about the mind. The chapters in this part
each consider the place of naturalism in philosophy of mind, but they do so from
diverse angles, respectively appealing to the methods and literatures of phenome-
nology, enactivism, cognitive science, and philosophy of language. Philosophers
of mind often link the concepts of naturalism and normativity by asking whether
or not normative aspects of experience, such as morality, judgments, or values
can be “naturalized.”28 Feminist philosophers frequently approach this question
from an inverse direction; they reveal mechanisms whereby normative values re-
garding gender and race creep into naturalistic explanation.29
For our purposes, we can define naturalism broadly as the view that the mind
can be fully explained by the sciences. In a recent article titled “Naturalisms in
Philosophy of Mind,” Stephen Horst writes that “naturalism has become a kind
of ideology in philosophical circles—​that is, it is a widely shared commitment
to a way of believing, speaking and acting whose basic assumptions are seldom
examined or argued for” (Horst 2009, 221).30 Current disagreements within phi-
losophy of mind over naturalism generally arise over how best to fulfill these
kinds of commitments and not over whether or not naturalistic approaches
to mind should be pursued in the first place.31 Notably, new naturalisms that
interpret the requirement about scientific explanation more loosely than
others have been developed. These include nonreductive naturalism (Millikan
 Introduction 13

1984), naive naturalism (Hornsby 2001), and liberal naturalism (De Caro and
Macarthur 2004).
The automatic acceptance of naturalism in philosophy of mind contrasts
sharply with the place of naturalism in feminist circles. As Sally Haslanger and
Ásta observe, “Feminists tend to be wary of any suggestion that a category is ‘nat-
ural,’ or that what’s ‘natural’ should dictate how we organize ourselves socially”
(2017). We can define naturalism about sex as the view that sexual categories can
be fully explained by the sciences and/​or that sex is constitutively related to phys-
iological and/​or anatomical aspects of the body. Feminist philosophers largely
reject the folk tendency to see sex as a “natural” phenomenon in these senses of
the term.32 Likewise, biological conceptions of race are widely criticized (Appiah
1985; Haslanger 2000; Zack 2002), as are physiological explanations of sexual
orientation (Stein 1999; Johnston 2008).
Feminist criticisms of naturalism emphasize the pragmatic concern that sci-
ence is not a socially and politically neutral enterprise. As many mainstream
philosophers of science have pointed out, observation and interpretation are sit-
uated in social and historical contexts (Kuhn 1970; Latour and Wooglar 1986).
Insofar as science does not incorporate methods to keep its social assumptions
in check, it will be ripe for reading current social arrangements into scientific
data.33 We must note, however, that feminist criticisms of naturalism do not
necessarily lead to social construction, the view that social factors play a causal
role in the existence of the phenomenon. Nor do they inevitably lead to the sex-​
gender distinction, often used to shield naturalistic ideas about sex from amend-
ment or criticism by relegating considerations of social and cultural factors to
the concept of “gender.”34
The essays in part III inhabit the tense intersection between philosophy of
mind’s embrace of naturalism and feminist philosophy’s skeptical attitude to-
ward natural categories. In so doing, they take a wider view on mental phe-
nomena than is common in either field, attending to both the “natural” and
“sociocultural” aspects of mind, and, more important, questioning presumptions
of hard and fast divisions between nature and culture, fact and value, and science
and phenomenology. How do we best eliminate social bias and falsely norma-
tive standards when relying on third-​person scientific descriptions? How can
4E cognition theory better take account of the social and political contexts of
minds? What can neuroscience and evolutionary biology contribute to theories
of gender? To what extent can feminist methods make science more rigorous?
What kinds of metaphysical views are implicated by the language that we use to
talk about the body and its sex(es) and gender(s)?
In c­ hapter 9, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist
Critique of Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” first published in
1989, Judith Butler notes that naturalistic accounts of sexual desire partake in an
14 Introduction

obvious category mistake: they attempt to explain first-​person experiential phe-

nomena purely with reference to third-​person scientific studies of the objective
body. However, a phenomenological approach, which begins in first-​personal
experience, also invites the false universalization of particular social biases. For
example, Maurice Merleau-​Ponty conceives of “normal” or “non-​pathological”
sexual desire only in terms of a male subject who is aroused by a female object.35
Butler emphasizes that not only does this normative and normalizing view of
sexual desire apply only to a subset of humans (namely, heterosexual men), but
that it is also wielded politically to pathologize those who do not conform to the
presumed standard.36
Chapter 10, “Enactivism and Gender Performativity,” answers Butler’s call to
develop a theoretical framework that is capable of attending to the social partic-
ularity and individuality of the subject in question by providing an enactivist ac-
count of gender. Ashby Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie argue that enactivism,
or the view that cognition is a product of the dynamic interaction between or-
ganism and environment, has not yet gone far enough in its recognition of the
social, cultural, and intersubjective nature of cognition. To address this gap, fem-
inist theories can provide enactivism with ways to account for the role power
plays in shaping cognition and an individual’s life-​world. Inversely, enactivism
can offer feminists an account of how gender is produced by the confluence of
relational, pragmatic, and biological processes.
Anne Jacobson’s chapter, “Norms and Neuroscience: The Case of Borderline
Personality Disorder,” addresses the question of whether dominant practices
of cognitive neuroscience are shaped by patriarchal values. She focuses on the
case of borderline personality disorder, a syndrome that is predominantly diag-
nosed in women and whose distinguishing features include gender-​associated
characteristics such as a fragile sense of self and a deficit in empathy. Jacobson
argues that neuroscience can be useful for feminist analysis due to its focus on
explaining a being’s well-​functioning within a given niche, which provides a
way to take account of an organism’s values and interests while still employing a
third-​person investigatory framework.
Chapter 12, “Embodiments of Sex and Gender: The Metaphors of Speaking
Surfaces,” by Gabrielle Benette Jackson highlights a problem with much feminist
literature on embodiment: most theorists appeal to metaphors—​“the metaphors
of speaking surfaces”—​to capture the ways that social forces mold bodily be-
havior into sexes and genders. Using verbs such as “manifest” or “generate,”
feminists represent women’s bodies as “texts,” “scripts,” “surfaces,” and “sites.”
This move misleads in regard to the underlying ontology of sex and gender be-
cause it implies that human experience should be categorized reductively, ac-
cording to exclusive dichotomies between the internal and external, subjective
and objective, active and passive, and natural and cultural.
 Introduction 15

By asking “Whose mind?” and “To whom is mind attributed?” the chapters
in part III not only provide unique accounts of what the mind is, but also fore-
ground important methodological considerations when working with third-​
person and first-​person perspectives on mental phenomena. Butler’s chapter
exposes the tendency in both science and phenomenology to take examples of
male, heterosexual desire as models for all sexual desire. In c­ hapter 10, Butnor
and MacKenzie reveal that the methods of 4E cognition theory often evade the
question of “Whose mind?” by employing too narrow meanings of concepts such
as “embodiment,” “embeddedness,” and the “social.” Jacobson’s observation in
­chapter 11 that borderline personality disorder is not proportionally distributed
among men and women leads to a theory about how best to account for values
using neuroscientific explanation. Finally, Jackson’s chapter shows us how using
certain metaphors to describe the body can ironically instill a neglect of bodily
and social context in theories about the mind, a separation that feminist scholars
have long sought to overcome.

Part IV: Body and Mind

Most anthologies in philosophy in mind begin with a part on mind-​body du-

alism. In contrast, we have placed this part near the end of our book because
the problems and vocabularies respectively employed by philosophers of mind
and feminist philosophers have traditionally implicated different conceptions
of “mind” and “body.” Having first familiarized ourselves with differences be-
tween individualist and relational notions of mind, as well as naturalist and
phenomenological notions of body in parts I–​III, we are better able to see how
the arguments in part IV employ these broadened perspectives on “mind” and
“body” in order to make original contributions to a centuries-​old debate.
The prevalence of naturalism in philosophy of mind goes hand in hand with
the prevalence of physicalism, the view that the mind is entirely physical in na-
ture.37 Gilbert Ryle’s idea that the mental realm is connected to the observable
realm via dispositions to behave in certain ways is a precursor to present-​day
approaches such as eliminativism, functionalism, and computationalism that
likewise insist, contrary to Descartes’s dualism, that there is nothing occult about
the mind (Ryle 1949).38 Various versions of physicalism attempt to explain the
mental in terms of its identity with, reducibility to, or supervenience on, the
physical.39 The physical is in turn conceived of as a brain state, which shifts the
focus from the external observations of behaviorism to internal functionings of
the brain and thus to empirical data derived from brain-​imaging technologies.
The question of the nature and basis of consciousness parallels the ques-
tion of the body-​mind relationship because providing a theoretical account of
16 Introduction

experience, including its phenomenal or “what it’s like” aspects, presents the
hardest problem for physicalism. The “hard” problem of consciousness is the
problem of explaining consciousness in physical terms (Chalmers 1995, 1996). It
highlights what many have called the “explanatory gap” between matter and con-
sciousness, the idea that no amount of explanation at the level of matter can yield
an understanding of our phenomenal experience (Levine 1983; Drayson 2015).
Many recent accounts in philosophy of mind offer suggestions for how to close
or bypass this gap.40
Ironically, contemporary physicalisms often embrace the terms of Descartes’s
dualism even as they are rejecting the position overall; they deny that an imma-
terial mind exists while also preserving the Cartesian/​Newtonian conception of
matter as that which is passive, unthinking, divisible, and knowable by science.
By contrast, some philosophers of mind challenge both Cartesian dualism and
materialism by theorizing in terms of mental and nonmental properties instead
of mental and physical categories (Russell 2004; Montero 2001).41
Feminist philosophers share with contemporary philosophers of mind the
tendency to seek ontological possibilities beyond mind-​body dualism.42 Unlike
many philosophers of mind, however, they are critical of a reductive physicalism
that would identify mind with a physical, biological, anatomical, or neurolog-
ical state. Feminists and other theorists who are likewise invested in fostering
liberatory social change have long argued that mind-​body dualism enables not
only sexist oppression, but also racism, colonialism, heterosexism, ableism, and
speciesism.43 Such views maintain that dualism entails a hierarchical ordering of
mind and body that has inevitably been mapped on to social groups such as men
and women, colonizers and the colonized, White people and people of color, and
upper-​class and working-​class peoples, thereby facilitating social mechanisms
of differentiation, discrimination, and oppression. Moreover, dualism seems in-
consistent with the experiences of the oppressed.44 Reductive physicalism has
also been deployed historically to justify the use and abuse of nature and the sub-
ordination of women (Merchant 1980).
Like the scholarly terrain in philosophy of mind, a careful examination of con-
sciousness has gone hand in hand with feminist considerations of the mind-​body
relationship. Feminist interest in the content and structure of consciousness is
as much practical as it is theoretical due to the fact that “consciousness-​raising”
has been the primary method for inciting political mobilization in women’s
movements in the United States since the 1970s (Garry and Pearsall 1989, 251).
Consciousness-​raising is a collective practice whereby women generate aware-
ness of the structural conditions that restrict their freedom by sharing with
each other descriptions of their first-​personal experiences, especially those
experiences that society refutes or silences. This practice works to expose “false
consciousness” (a consciousness that harbors false perceptions of reality as if they
 Introduction 17

were true) and cultivate “feminist consciousness” (a consciousness that is skilled

in sorting true perceptions of reality from illusions that are part and parcel of the
dictates of a sexist social system) (Bartky 1975; MacKinnon 1989, 108, 115–​116;
King 1988, 69–​72). Such analyses of consciousness are related to the Marxist pro-
ject of examining how material conditions shape the form and contents, and thus
the epistemic and cognitive capacities, of particular minds. Articulating this re-
lationship between the internal/​experiential and external/​material is one of the
hardest problems for feminism, just as describing subjective experience in objec-
tive terms is the hardest problem for philosophy of mind.
Part IV features questions and arguments that emerge at the intersections of
these two different literatures that investigate the relationship between body and
mind. Is physicalism compatible with the idea that beliefs, desires, and emotions
are social and relational, constituted in part by external factors? Does a “mate-
rialist feminism,” or a “feminist materialism,” suggest a contradiction in terms?
How are views about who (or what) has a mind related to theories about the
nature of minds and their connections to bodies? Would studies of animal cogni-
tion benefit from employing feminist methods for theorizing across disciplines
and power relations? Is sexual orientation a mental disposition, a biological urge,
or a mix of both?
In ­chapter 13, “Against Physicalism,” first published in 2000, Naomi Scheman
builds on her early critique of individualism to present a unique argument
against physicalism (Scheman 1983). She begins by challenging philosophers’
unexamined conviction that mental events, states, and processes enter into psy-
chological explanation as particulars. Given this faith, the reasonableness of the
physicalist project seems irresistible. By contrast, Scheman brings to the fore the
irreducibly relational nature of our mental lives by acknowledging the role of
social practices and their patterns of salience in shaping the meaning of beliefs,
desires, and emotions. She concludes that physicalism is not necessarily false, but
that it is empty or vacuous because mental objects are not particulars.
Chapter 14, “Why Feminists Should Be Materialists and Vice Versa,” by Paula
Droege places feminism in conversation with cognitive ethology in order to
mount an argument against Scheman’s critique of physicalism. Droege believes
that taking a materialist approach to reality can help feminists gain an under-
standing of the physical forces that contribute to our beliefs and values. Likewise,
materialists gain from feminism an array of epistemic and ethical tools for
examining faulty assumptions that misdirect research, as well as strategies for
surmounting common obstacles to interdisciplinary collaboration.
In ­chapter 15, “Which Bodies Have Minds? Feminism, Panpsychism, and
the Attribution Question,” Jennifer McWeeny reframes the classic metaphys-
ical problem of how the mind interacts with the body in terms of the question
of mental attribution: Which bodies have minds? She develops a taxonomy of
18 Introduction

possible answers to the question by jointly examining critical social theorists’

descriptions of experiences of mental attribution associated with the bodies of
women, Black people, laborers, and others and theories of physicalist panpsy-
chism from the philosophy of mind. McWeeny’s analysis reveals that our theo-
ries about what a mind is are inextricably connected with our beliefs about who
(or what) has a mind.
E. Díaz-​León’s contribution, c­hapter 16, “Sexual Orientation: The Desire
View,” argues that, contrary to accounts that would locate sexual orientation in
physiology, orientation is a complex mental state grounded in a person’s rela-
tional beliefs, desires, and dispositions. She maintains that the ordinary concept
of sexual orientation is determined by a combination of two factors: (1) one’s
own sex and gender, and (2) the sex and gender of the persons for whom one
is disposed to have sexual desires. In a move not unlike Scheman’s, Díaz-​León’s
view of sexual orientation builds on the idea that the link between a certain
mental state and a certain behavior cannot be specified independently of other
mental states.
Part IV highlights how thinking about to whom mind should be attributed
spurs innovative “what” positions that shed a different light on the mind-​body
relationship. Scheman develops a formidable argument against physicalism
by questioning the entrenched habit of construing mental events and states as
particulars that belong to one person rather than to a society or culture. Droege’s
discussion of nonhuman minds leads her to advance a form of feminist mate-
rialism. Through the juxtaposition of feminism and panpsychism, McWeeny
shows how mental attribution patterns reflect views about whether bodies are
the types of things can exist without minds and vice versa. Moreover, the whose
question is presupposed in the concept of sexual orientation that is the focus of
Díaz-​León’s study. Inversely to those who seek a physical explanation for mental
phenomena, Díaz-​León traces what is standardly thought to be a physiological
phenomenon, namely, sexual urges, to the content of desire.

Part V: Memory and Emotion

The four chapters in the final part of Feminist Philosophy of Mind generate ac-
counts of specific mental phenomena by appealing to notions from the book’s
other parts, including the ideas of a gendered mind, a raced and encultured
mind, the relational self, relational agency, and the embodied mind. How does
thinking of mind as a gendered and raced phenomenon yield new ways of
thinking about the structure and function of emotions? How does trauma affect
the continuity of memory and thus personal identity? How does thinking of the
self in relational terms complicate traditional accounts of memory and emotion
 Introduction 19

in philosophy of mind? How does thinking of grief and love specifically as they
occur in the experiences of non-​Western women and women of color alter our
accounts of the natures of these emotions?
Philosophers of mind are increasingly interested in memory. They generally
theorize about memory in three main ways. First, it is discussed in the context of
theories about the continuity of self and personal identity. Second, taxonomies of
different kinds of memory have been developed with particular emphasis placed
on “episodic” memory, or the memory of past events that one has experienced
(Tulving 1983; Droege 2012; Cheng and Werning 2016). Third, considerable ef-
fort has been devoted to constructing causal theories of memory. One of its most
comprehensive articulations connects mental representations through memory
traces (Bernecker 2009). Finally, the need to study memory and emotions to-
gether given their functional similarities has also been proposed (Goldie 2012;
de Sousa 2017).
Somewhat similar to memory, emotions had received a cursory treatment in
analytic philosophy of mind until the 1970s. This early lack of interest in emotions
as mental phenomena likely resulted from the folk belief that emotions are un-
intelligent bodily impulses structurally opposed to thought and reason (Rorty
1980). However, the recent embrace of interdisciplinarity in philosophy of mind,
and related engagements with developmental psychology, social psychology, and
neuroscience, have opened the study of emotions in exciting ways. For example,
contemporary emotion theory delineates a variety of parts to emotional expe-
rience including evaluative, physiological, phenomenological, expressive, be-
havioral, and mental components (Ben-​Ze’ev 2000; Scherer 2009). Philosophers
have also focused on assessing emotions’ appropriateness and rationality, in ad-
dition to determining their role in motivating action (de Sousa 1987; Zhu and
Thagard 2002). Others have argued that emotions are best theorized in terms of
their similarity with perceptions (Prinz 2004; Döring 2007; Tappolet 2016).
Like contemporary philosophy of mind, feminist literature has paid spe-
cial attention to developing theoretical descriptions of the faculties of memory
and emotion. Such work has feminist import since women’s accounts of states
of affairs are often put into question on the purported grounds that women are
emotional, irrational, and prone to cognitive inaccuracies. For instance, several
feminists have formed theories of memory by looking to concrete examples of
the way that memory functions in traumas that disproportionately affect women
and other demographic groups, such as rape, sexual abuse, racism, colonization,
and genocide (Brison 2003; Alexander 2005; Alcoff 2011).
A primary aim of feminist theories of emotion is to consider how particular
emotions are differentially cultivated and experienced by members of different
social categories (Lorde 1984; Narayan 1988; Jaggar 1989). For example, anger
has been a frequent object of feminist analysis given its gender-​specificity and
20 Introduction

race-​specificity in oppressive societies: the anger of women and people of color

is readily dismissed as irrational and unfounded, while the anger of men and
White people is often celebrated as rational and righteous (Scheman 1980; Frye
1983; Lorde 1984). Other emotions including love, shame, disgust, rage, and
hope have been theorized with a feminist lens.45
In the opening chapter of this part, c­ hapter 17, “Outliving Oneself: Trauma,
Memory, and Personal Identity,” first published in 1997, Susan J. Brison lays
the groundwork for current work on memory in a number of ways. First, she
references real-​life cases rather than thought experiments. Second, the trauma
she discusses in relation to theories of memory is her own. It is thus a break-
through piece where a woman has the courage to analyze her first-​personal ex-
perience of trauma philosophically, and where the communicative and narrative
practice of philosophy helps her and others heal. Finally, she shows how her
sense of self and her memory are constitutively affected by her relationships, so it
cannot be that self and memory are nonsocial, nonrelational phenomena.
Chapter 18 by Iva Apostolova, “Does Neutral Monism Provide the Best
Framework for Relational Memory?” builds on Sue Campbell’s argument in
favor of a relational model of memory as opposed to an archival one. Apostolova
suggests that Bertrand Russell’s theory of neutral monism offers the best episte-
mological and metaphysical framework for relational memory because it charts a
solution to the problem of “semantic contagion,” a term first used by Ian Hacking
to signify the phenomenon that occurs when a condition seems to spread im-
mediately after it is publicly identified and described (Hacking 1995, 238). This
concept is often used to discredit the memories of survivors of sexual assault and
so developing an alternative explanation is crucial for a feminist response to this
dismissal.
In ­chapter 19, “The Odd Case of a Bird-​Mother: Relational Selfhood and a
‘Method of Grief,’ ” Vrinda Dalmiya offers an account of selfhood that centers on
the perspective of a bereaved mother. Experiencing extreme forms of being out
of control due to grief, the bereaved mother’s self emerges from a pervasive self-​
mistrust that then goes on to ground the acceptance of herself as dispositionally
open to being undone by grief. In its ability to capture the opacity of the self,
Dalmiya’s “method of grief ” turns out to be a far more effective means for self-​
awareness than Descartes’s method of doubt, which operates according to epi-
stemic certainty.
Chapter 20, “Equanimity and the Loving Eye: A Buddhist-​Feminist Account
of Loving Attention,” focuses on loving attention, which Emily McRae defines
as a way of paying attention to others that is motivated by care, respect, and
kindness. This way of attending, integral to Mahayana Buddhist philosophy
of mind and ethics, is also central to many influential feminist conceptions of
 Introduction 21

moral perception. McRae shows how Buddhist skills of equanimity and mind-
fulness are necessary for cultivating loving attention in feminist realms. She also
highlights their roles in effecting a person’s self-​transformation from an arrogant
perceiver to someone who can lovingly attend to others.
Employing an approach that thinks the What? Whose? and To whom? aspects
of mind together brings different perspectives to familiar philosophical topics, as
we have already witnessed in parts I–​IV. The authors of part V theorize memory,
grief, love, and attention not merely in abstract terms, but as phenomena asso-
ciated with particular bodies situated in specific social locations. In ­chapter 18,
Apostolova observes that different capacities for memory are often attributed to
women than to men. Brison and Dalmiya analyze concrete examples of women’s
trauma and grief to emphasize the relational nature of the self and self-​knowledge.
McRae’s chapter concentrates on different modes of attending carried out by dif-
ferent social actors in contexts of oppression, and this perspective illuminates the
interconnectedness of faculties of attention, perception, and love.

The Future of Feminist Philosophy of Mind

When we consider the twenty essays in this book collectively rather than indi-
vidually, we begin to see feminist philosophy of mind not merely as a trending
topic of interest but as a recognizable field or tradition with its own distinctive set
of core questions, methods, and internal conversations. Together, the chapters
in Feminist Philosophy of Mind establish a basis for further inquiry and future
growth of the field, and for new ways of combining the questions What is the
mind? Whose mind is the model for the theory? and To whom is mind attributed?,
as well as adding others to the method. We expect that subsequent research will
not only extend the themes and debates pursued in this book, but will also utilize
the fecundity of these methodological approaches to grow in new, not-​yet-​imag-
ined directions. Here are a few that seem most obvious.
First, it is likely that a more direct and expansive debate will soon take shape
over the question of whether minds are necessarily or contingently gendered,
raced, oriented, classed, cultured, and so on. While theorists may agree that the
mind is relational and situated, they will likely disagree about the mechanisms
and consequences of social situation. The parallels between the theoretical
landscapes surrounding theories of mind and theories of gender are liable to
come into greater relief (for example, that there are physicalists, eliminativists,
dispositionalists, extensionists, externalists, and so on, in both areas). Moreover,
we expect that more “mental” theories of sex, gender, and other social catego-
ries will be developed that identify specific genders with a particular structure
22 Introduction

of consciousness, disposition, functional attitude, or mental content rather than

with physiology, behavior, or performance (Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Dembroff
2016; McWeeny 2017). We likewise predict that considerations of the differ-
ential attributions of mind across social groups, such as men and women and
White people and people of color, will incite fresh theories about the mind and
its components that go beyond the insights of this book.
Second, and as a consequence of the first point, the future of feminist phi-
losophy of mind demands looking at the relationship between mind and a di-
verse array of social locations, and centering the experiences of a diverse array
of people. We believe that developing feminist philosophy of mind in a robustly
intersectional way requires more work that takes up the interplay between phi-
losophy of mind and philosophy of race.46 For example, it would be impor-
tant to articulate an account of mind that could underwrite phenomena such
as epistemologies of ignorance (Tuana and Sullivan 2007; Medina 2013; McRae
2019) and other cognitive consequences of the racial contract (Mills 1999). In
addition, an obvious trajectory for feminist philosophy of mind is to theorize
about disabilities and neurally diverse cognitive abilities in ways that do not re-
duce such experiences to “pathology” or “exception.”47 Thinking about the mind
with reference to examples of transgender experience and gender transitioning
also holds much promise for the field (Bettcher 2009; Shrage 2009). Additionally,
we think that studies of the relationship between mind and socioeconomic class
are warranted (Charlesworth 2000).
Third, there are a number of topics in feminist philosophy of mind that have
so far been underexplored and undertheorized. For instance, while many have
noted the relationship between perception and the mechanisms of sexism and
racism, more in-​depth analysis is needed (Rohrbach 1994; Ngo 2017; Ortega
2019). We also expect that many emotions such as joy, regret, frustration, and
equanimity that have not yet been examined in detail, as well as mental pro-
cesses, such as sensation, attention, and imagination, will be further explored
with a feminist perspective (Jones 2012; Kind 2013). Extending existing theories
of action, agency, and autonomy also constitutes a rich horizon for feminist phi-
losophy of mind (Veltman and Piper 2014; Brancazio 2018). Additionally, devel-
oping the intersections between feminist philosophy of mind and epistemology,
metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, as well as interdisciplinary areas such as neuro-
science and global health is an obvious next step (Dalmiya 2017; Rippon 2019).
Fourth, the topics of artificial intelligence and posthumanism are evident
points of overlap for feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind since they en-
tail the consideration of the To whom? question and the need to examine social
and political concepts like “human,” “natural,” “man-​made,” “object,” “thing,” and
their relations with social categories like “women,” “people of color,” and “trans”
(Haraway 1991; Braidotti 2013; Weheliye 2014; Schneider 2019). Inversely, smart
 Introduction 23

technologies and artificial intelligences along with technological and genetic

enhancements are now part of our contemporary milieu and have already had
an enormous impact upon social relations, as well as the contours of political and
economic life.
As we look to the future of feminist philosophy of mind, our sincere wish is
that more and more philosophers begin to approach philosophical questions
not merely from the purview of one specialization, but with the compound eye
that follows from a willingness to build on insights from multiple domains of
inquiry and multiple framing questions. Though the professional practice of
surrounding oneself with others who are fluent in a specialized vocabulary and
who predominantly share a social and cultural demographic has generated many
important innovations throughout the history of philosophy, it has also limited
us—​herded our creativity into certain myopic channels.
The authors of Feminist Philosophy of Mind push against these barriers and
beckon us to explore fertile landscapes where mind and social location, self and
selves, naturalism and normativity, body and mind, rationality and emotion,
and other historically opposed pairings are not cordoned off from one another
by fiat, but mingle unchecked in the reality of everyday experience and eve-
ryday theorizing. This new space of inquiry is both an opening in the ossified
edifice of our ancient and modern discipline and a precipice from where we
can begin to see the promise of a professional milieu that values the search for
truth and illumination above adherence to disciplinary conventions and the
comfort of known professional practices and discourses. Feminist philosophy
of mind makes explicit that multidimensional theorizing requires consider-
able self-​reflection on the part of the theorist so that he/​she/​they are aware of
the ways his/​her/​their membership in a certain species, race, gender, sexuality,
nationality, class, and ability is imbricated in both the oppression of others and
the very fabric of theorizing. We all must be wary of the ways social location
can inadvertently direct theorists to take up and guard certain positions for
reasons other than philosophical ones.
Because the concept of mind is a keystone aspect of most philosophical the-
ories from ethics to epistemology, from language to action, from logic to aes-
thetics, we believe that the insights generated by feminist philosophers of mind
in the coming decades will have reverberations across our discipline and beyond.
This potential for impact coupled with the openness of the field at this early mo-
ment in its development makes it a most exciting time to pursue the themes
taken up in Feminist Philosophy of Mind. We invite you, the reader, whatever
your professional training, cultural background, gender&race& to find your own
ingresses into this evolving terrain, to explore the rich philosophical questions
posed by the authors in this book, and to participate in shaping this nascent field
into a widespread and indispensable philosophical project.
24 Introduction

Notes

1. The list of faculty members for the Institute reflects this orientation and included
Miri Albahari, Dan Arnold, Katalin Balog, David J. Chalmers, Christian Coseru,
Shaun Gallagher, Jonardon Ganeri, Jay Garfield, Uriah Kriegel, Alva Noë, Mark
Siderits, Susanna Siegel, Charles Siewert, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi.
2. Here we adapt a definition from Butnor and McWeeny (2014, 4). See also Alcoff
and Kittay (2007), Tuana (2007, 21–​22), Lugones and Spelman (1983), Collins
(1990), and Kishwar (1990), all of whom question the inclusivity of the term
“feminism.”
3. Examples of feminist philosophy span a diverse array of philosophical traditions,
approaches, and topics, from analytic philosophy to Continental philosophy, prag-
matism, and comparative philosophy, and from ethics and political philosophy to
epistemology, metaphysics, logic, philosophy of science, and aesthetics. These
engagements are also informed by different kinds of feminisms, including, for ex-
ample, Black, Latina, Asian American, intersectional, transnational, Third World,
queer, trans, and crip feminisms.
4. For descriptions of philosophy of mind, see McLaughlin, Beckerman, and Walter
(2009) and Kim (2011).
5. Paradigmatic approaches of this kind include Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth thought
experiment, designed to show that mental content is dependent on factors external to
the mind (Putnam 1975); Derek Parfit’s teletransporter problem, which emphasizes
psychological connectedness over personal identity (Parfit 1984); and David
J. Chalmers’s zombie conceivability problems that challenge physicalist accounts of
consciousness (Chalmers 1996).
6. On thought and mental content see Harman (1973), Fodor (1975), Millikan (1984),
Kriegel (2002); on belief see Churchland (1981), Stitch (1983), Schwitzgebel (2002);
on perception see Armstrong (1961), Siegel (2010), Coseru (2012); on imagination
see Kind (2001, 2013), Schellenberg (2013); on attention see Mole (2011), Ganeri
(2017); on emotion see Rorty (1980), Goldie (2000), Prinz (2004); on intentionality
see Brentano (1973), Dretske (1981), Crane (1998), Arnold (2012); on conscious-
ness see Dennett (1991), Chalmers (1996), Siewert (1998), Zahavi (2005), Baker
(2013); on intelligence see Turing (1950); on dreams see Flanagan (2000), Gerrans
(2012).
7. On consciousness see Bartky (1975), King (1988), Wynter (2001), Maitra (2014); on
self and personal identity see Anzaldúa (1999), Meyers (1997, 2014), Shotwell and
Sangrey (2009), Shrage (2009); on agency see Veltman and Piper (2014), Herr (2018),
Brancazio (2018).
8. See Fanon (2008), Young (1980), Bordo (1994), Gordon (1995), Alcoff (2006),
Bettcher (2009), Ortega (2016), McWeeny (2017).
9. See Hegarty (1997), Fine (2010), Bluhm, Jacobson, and Maibom (2012), Joel (2012),
Rippon (2019).
10. See Scheman (1980, 1983), Frye (1983), Lorde (1984), Antony and Witt (1993),
Rohrbach (1994), Campbell (1998), Alexander (2005), Medina (2013).
 Introduction 25

11. See Daly (1990), Plumwood (1993), Quijano (2000), Barad (2007), Alaimo and
Hekman (2008), Coole and Frost (2010), Weheliye (2014), Wilson (2015), Grosz
(2017).
12. See Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Johnson (1987), Jackson and Petit (1988), Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Baier (1997), Garfield, Peterson, and Perry (2001),
Tomasello (1999), Clark (2008), Thompson (2007), Hutto and Myin (2013), Ganeri
(2012), Gallagher (2017), Newen, de Bruin, and Gallagher (2018), Kiverstein (2019),
Schneider (2019).
13. See also McWeeny (2021).
14. The phrase “Ain’t I a woman?” is attributed to Sojourner Truth. However, there are
competing accounts of her 1851 speech at the Akron Women’s Suffrage Convention.
See Painter, who questions the accuracy of Frances D. Gage’s account, which includes
the famous phrase (Painter 1997, 164–​178).
15. On the relationship between Beauvoir’s and Descartes’s views, see Bauer (2001,
46–​77).
16. hooks’s idea can be considered a precursor to contemporary discussions of
intersectionality in feminist theory. See also Combahee River Collective (1978), Davis
(1983), and King (1988). The term “intersectionality” was developed in the context
of Black feminist theorizing in part to emphasize the invisibility of Black women’s
experiences in feminist and antiracist organizing, but also to express a unique on-
tological situation associated with Black women’s social locations. For more on the
concept’s meaning and history, see Crenshaw (1991) and Carasthasis (2016).
17. See also Collins (1990, 6) and King (1988, 43–​46).
18. See Spivak (1988), Oyěwùmí (1997), Quijano (2000), Lugones (2007), Taylor (2015),
Harfouch (2018), Pickens (2019), Tullman (2019).
19. We use the neologism “gender&race&” as a placeholder for a list of social locations.
“Gender&race&” is thus shorthand for “gender&race&class&sexuality&nationality
&ability&etc.” The word is intended to remind readers that “feminist philosophy” as
we define it embraces a robustly intersectional understanding of social location, and
rejects the unthinking prioritization of gender in its analyses, especially insofar as
gender is naively equated with White, upper-​class, western, cisgendered, heterosexual,
and able-​bodied women’s experiences. At the same time, the ambiguous “&” that both
connects and separates “gender” and “race” emphasizes that not all instances of fem-
inist philosophy of mind employ intersectional methods, and leaves open the possi-
bility of multiple conceptions of the relationship between gender and race (and other
social locations), from that of a juxtaposition of analytically discrete categories to an
interweaving of mutually constitutive ones. See also note 16.
20. Here and throughout Feminist Philosophy of Mind, we employ the term “gender” in
the broadest sense to signify a person’s genre or type in regard to social categories such
as woman, man, intersex, transgender, agender, gender nonbinary, and gender-​queer.
In this usage, “gender” is not necessarily distinct from “sex”; it does not specify the
cultural as opposed to the natural, nor does it indicate the psychological as opposed
to the physical or anatomical. For criticisms of the sex-​gender distinction, see Gatens
(1991) and Heinämaa (1997).
26 Introduction

21. See also Appiah (1985) and Zack (2002).

22. For thinkers who discuss gender and race see Block (1999) and Siegel (2017, 170–​
196). See Yergeau (2013) for an argument that philosophers of mind often construe
the mind in ableist terms.
23. On multiple consciousness, see also King (1988).
24. See also Fanon (2008, 90) and Beauvoir’s discussion of women’s “divided” conscious-
ness (2010, 67, 302, 572, 749), summarized in McWeeny (2017). Margaret A. Simons
argues that Beauvoir’s theory of woman in The Second Sex was influenced by Du Bois’s
idea, as well as Richard Wright’s view of racial oppression (Simons 2001, 176–​178).
25. See Parfit (1984), Korsgaard (1989), Albahari (2007), Strawson (2009), Siderits,
Thompson, and Zahavi (2011), Ganeri (2015).
26. See also Parfit (1984, 245–​280).
27. See Wilkes (1988) for an exception.
28. See Putnam (1982), Papineau (1993), De Caro and Macarthur (2010), Churchland
(2011), Díaz-​León (2016), Hufendiek (2016), and Tomasello (2016).
29. See Harding (1986), Hubbard (1990), Longino (1990), Haraway (1991), Nelson
(1992), Fausto-​Sterling (2000), Zack (2002), Code (2006), Fine (2012), Vidal (2012),
Rippon (2019). This approach is not incompatible with certain strains in philosophy
of mind that emphasize the interplay of fact and value, such as Hacking (1999) and
Marchetti and Marchetti (2017).
30. Horst provides a classification of naturalistic views, which includes philosophical
naturalisms that see mind as a natural phenomenon that can be explained by the sci-
ences, and empirical naturalisms that see philosophical inquiry as a special type of
empirical inquiry (Horst 2009, 222).
31. For example, theorists are divided between those that believe a naturalistic explana-
tion of mind requires causal closure (Papineau 1993) and those that do not (Davidson
1970; Baker 2009). Another disagreement lies between those who believe a physicalist
explanation of mind is best served by mind-​brain identity theory (Smart 1959) and
those who advocate multiple realizability (Fodor 1974; Kim 1992).
32. See Beauvoir (2010), Butler (1990), Wittig (1992), Heinämaa (1997), Fausto-​Sterling
(2000), Warnke (2007), and Garry (2011). A common criticism of naturalistic views
of sex is that a set of physical features circumscribes too narrow a group to capture a
phenomenon like womanhood; there will always be individuals who are regarded as
women but nonetheless lack the relevant determinant, or who possess the determi-
nant but are not regarded as women.
33. For salient examples of this phenomeon, see Gould (1981), Martin (1991), Fausto-​
Sterling (2000), and Fine (2010).
34. Phenomenological accounts of sexual difference are often critical of both naturalistic
explanation and social constructionism due to their shared reliance on problematic
notions of causality. See Beauvoir (2010), Gatens (1991), Heinämaa (1997, 2003),
McWeeny (2017).
35. See also Beauvoir’s criticisms of Sigmund Freud’s and Alfred Adler’s views about
women’s psychology (2010, 49–​61).
36. See also Weiss (2015).
 Introduction 27

37. Naturalism and physicalism should not be conflated even if they are complimentary
to one another. Those who believe in the existence of nonphysical forces or nonphy-
sical laws in nature may be naturalists without being physicalists.
38. For functionalism, see Putnam (1975) and Jackson and Petit (1988); for
computationalism, see Fodor (1975).
39. See Smart (1959) for a classic version of identity theory; Paul Churchland (1981), Patricia
Churchland (1986), Dennett (1987) for reductionism and eliminativism; Davidson
(1970), van Cleve (1990), Garfield (2001) for supervenience accounts. See also note 32.
40. See, for example, Dennett (1991, 2013), Block (2002), and Strawson (2006).
41. See also the critical alternatives to dualism cited in note 11.
42. See note 12.
43. See, for example, Anzaldúa (1999), Bordo (1987), Daly (1990), Plumwood (1993),
Quijano (2000). Cf. Gertler (2002).
44. Anzaldúa’s description of “mestiza consciousness” provides a classic example of this
incompatibility (Anzaldúa 1999). See also Du Bois (1903), Beauvoir (2010), Fanon
(2008), and King (1988).
45. See Ahmed (2004), Dalmiya (2009), Kim (2014), Whitney (2015), Green (2018),
Malantino (2019).
46. See note 16.
47. For some recent examples, see Nicki (2001), Kafer (2013), Yergeau (2013), Taylor
(2015), Larson (2018), and Pickens (2019).

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 PART I
MIND A N D GE N DE R & R ACE &
 1
Is the First-​Person Perspective Gendered?
Lynne Rudder Baker

The first-​person perspective, as I have argued at length elsewhere, is an essential

property of persons (Baker 2013, 2000, 2015).1 What I am concerned with here is
the bearing of the first-​person perspective—​in particular, the robust first-​person
perspective—​on one’s gender identity. The structure of my chapter is simple: first
to discuss the ideas of sex, gender, and gender identity; then to discuss the first-​
person perspective; and finally to discuss various questions about the relation
between the robust first-​person perspective and gender identity.

Sex, Gender, Then Gender Identity

The concepts of sex and gender are murky. Traditionally, a sharp and seemingly
simple distinction has been made between gender and sex: sex is determined
by the biological equipment that you were born with, usually categorized as
male or female, indicated by external genitalia and by internal indicators such
as reproductive organs, sex chromosomes, and gonads. Gender refers to “the
attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s
biological sex” (American Psychological Association 2011). Since there are other
construals of sex and gender and their relations, I will use this fairly straightfor-
ward construal as a starting point for launching my own view of the first-​person
perspective. However, my view can accommodate other accounts of sex and
gender or a critique of the distinction altogether.2
Moreover, the construal I started with is trebly imprecise: First, it presumes
that a culture determines a definite set of attitudes, feelings, and behaviors as-
sociated with a person’s sex, and that these attitudes, feelings, and behaviors are
not in conflict with each other. (Is being a tomboy part of a girl’s gender? Aren’t
some girls, but not others, tomboys in our society’s eyes?) Second, this defini-
tion of “gender” obscures the normative dimension of the attitudes, feelings,
and behaviors that a society associates with a person’s biological sex. There is not
so much an empirical correlation between certain attitudes, for example, and a
person’s sex; rather the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors reflect society’s expec-
tations about a person of one biological sex or the other. (Some societies expect

Lynne Rudder Baker, Is the First-​Person Perspective Gendered? In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0002
42 Mind and Gender&Race&

girls to gravitate toward “helping” professions and to shy away from combative
sports.) To frustrate these expectations can be costly: a girl who wants to be a
placekicker on a football team must be ready to endure rejection. Third, and per-
haps most interestingly, this construal of gender makes gender dependent on
there being clear answers about a person’s biological sex and about society’s ex-
pectations for a person of that sex.
That the two-​sex system of sex is not exhaustive is suggested by the existence
of intersexuals (Fausto-​Sterling 2000, 31). Intersexuals are people whose bodies
“mix together anatomical components conventionally attributed to both males
and females,” people who are neither clearly male nor female or are both at once
(for example, an XX child with masculine external genitalia) (Fausto-​Sterling
2000, 47).
We cannot, and morally should not, pass off this indeterminacy of sex by saying
that it is the result of a malfunction in fetal development. Some intersexuals may
appreciate having, say, both male and female anatomical features, and I don’t
think that we should call an identity that people endorse a “malfunction”—​any
more than I think that the Roman Catholic Church should call homosexuality an
“objective disorder.” Perhaps we should consider intersexuals more like albinos
(just different) than like hemophiliacs (abnormal). In nature, there is a biological
series at the ends of which are clear males and females (Fausto-​Sterling 2000, 31).
Although the two-​sex system is not in nature, it can be maintained by modern
surgery. Since gender concerns social attitudes toward sex, the murkiness intro-
duced by the existence of intersexuals carries over into gender.
The unclarity of the notions of gender and of sex is magnified when it
comes to the notion of gender identity, defined by the American Psychological
Association as “one’s sense of oneself as male, female or transgender” (American
Psychological Association 2011). There are gender roles, which may be accepted
or rejected, and stereotypical gender behaviors, which people of each gender
may or may not display. One may even reject one’s assigned sex. Transgendered
people—​“trans”—​do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth. “Trans”
may be used both as designating either a gender identity or a sex or both. A trans-
gendered woman was born a biological male, but thinks of herself as a woman,
and a transgendered man was born a biological female, but thinks of himself as a
man. The gender identity of trans does not accord with their assigned biological
sex. Some trans go on to have surgery and to have many of the distinguishing bi-
ological features of someone of the other biological sex. Some trans men freeze
their eggs before completing the transition. Some conceive and give birth.
The notions of sex, gender, and gender identity are tied in different ways to
embodiment. For convenience, I’ll suppose that sex is a matter of particular bio-
logical organs (parts of bodies); gender is a matter of attitudes and behaviors that
a culture associates with a biological sex; and gender identity is a matter of one’s
 Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered? 43

psychological and social attitudes and behaviors toward one’s own gender or
sex. These attitudes and behaviors, along with sexual feelings, concern the whole
embodied person. If (per impossibile!) there were disembodied persons, they
would have neither sex nor gender nor gender identity.
So sex is biological; gender is social; gender identity is psychological. Despite
the unclarity and complications of both the notions of gender and sex, my con-
cern here is primarily with gender identity, the way that one regards (or does not
regard) oneself as a sexual being. Attitudes and feelings about one’s own sex may
be confused or conflicted, in which case one’s gender identity may be confused
or conflicted. I shall consider gender identity to be attitudes and feelings—​even
if confused or conflicted—​toward one’s own biological sex, along with behaviors
that manifest them, regardless of their causal antecedents (implicit social condi-
tioning, explicit teaching, experience, deliberation, and so forth). With this un-
derstanding, I’ll construe the topic of this chapter to be whether or not having
a first-​person perspective brings with it any particular kind of gender identity,
where gender identity is taken to pertain to the whole person, rather than to any
subpersonal features of the person (for example, sexual organs or DNA). One’s
attitudes, behaviors, and feelings toward one’s sex clearly concern the whole
person, embodied and embedded in an environment.

What Is a Robust First-​Person Perspective?

Since the robust first-​person perspective is a central idea of my view of persons,

I’ll explain it at some length. The purpose of this (seemingly irrelevant?) exposi-
tion is to consider its relation to gender identity. So please bear with me.
I take a first-​person perspective to be a two-​stage dispositional property. It
begins with a rudimentary stage, which babies are born with. The rudimen-
tary stage provides its bearer a first-​person perspective on the environment and
allows its bearer to act intentionally on nearby objects. The rudimentary stage,
which comprises consciousness and intentionality, is shared by many non-
human mammals (chimpanzees) and prelinguistic human persons (for example,
infants). The robust stage, which is unique to language users, is a capacity to con-
ceive of oneself in the first person, to think of oneself as oneself.
The robust stage of the first-​person perspective—​for brevity, I’ll call it “a ro-
bust first-​person perspective”—​confers innumerable causal powers, such as the
capacity to enter into contracts, to write memoirs, to make commitments, to cul-
tivate new habits, and on and on. None of these characteristic human activities
would be possible without robust first-​person perspectives. The causal powers
conferred by the robust first-​person perspective are so vast that they make the
difference between persons and animals a difference in kind (Baker 2013).
44 Mind and Gender&Race&

This capacity has two substantive presuppositions: First, a robust (or rudimen-
tary) first-​person perspective requires embodiment. One must have a body located
in space, with a functioning brain, that interacts with the environment and allows
one to negotiate and act on the environment. The normally functioning brain
supplies the mechanisms that support one’s mental life, and the robust first-​person
perspective is a sophisticated feature of a person’s mental life. Second, and of
greater importance here, to have a robust first-​person perspective, one must have
a language of some grammatical complexity, and only persons can acquire such a
language. Only persons have robust first-​person perspectives. Your cat, no matter
how lovable, is incapable of having the attitudes that make up gender identity. This
is so because such attitudes require one to be able to conceive of herself qua first-​
personal, to conceive of herself in the first person, and this ability in turn requires
that she have a language that allows her to express many empirical concepts as well
as a concept of herself in the first person (Baker 2013, 130–​140). In greater detail:
The language required for someone to have a robust first-​person perspective
must have room for a self-​concept—​often marked by a “*” as in “I*” (pronounced
“I-​star”). To have a robust first-​person perspective, one must be able to entertain
thoughts like “I wonder how I* am going to die.” In “I wonder how I* am going
to die,” with the first occurrence of “I,” I refer to myself, and with the second oc-
currence of “I”—​the “I*,” I attribute to myself a first-​person reference. The first
occurrence of “I” is transparent; any co-​referring term can be substituted for it
salva veritate; but the second occurrence of “I” is opaque. It is not transparent,
but entails that the thinker or speaker conceives of herself or himself from the
first person. The second occurrence of “I” expresses a self-​concept.
Following Héctor-​ Neri Castañeda, I call such thoughts “I* thoughts”
(Castañeda 1966, 1967). I* thoughts are complex first-​personal thoughts with
linguistic or psychological main verbs in which the second occurrence of “I” is
not transparent. (Although all I* thoughts manifest a first-​person perspective,
not all thoughts that manifest a robust first-​person perspective are I* thoughts.
If you are looking at an old school picture and exclaim, “That’s me. I’m the one
in the red dress,” you manifest a robust first-​person perspective just as surely as
if you had said, “I believe that I* am the one in the red dress.”) Nevertheless,
in order to have a robust first-​person perspective, one must be able to think I*
thoughts, and hence one must have a self-​concept, signaled by “I*.”
Each of us who has a robust first-​person perspective has a self-​concept. The
self-​concept refers to the thinker or speaker conceived of from the first person.
No sentence in the third person has the same truth conditions as an “I*” sen-
tence. My wondering how I am going to die is not equivalent to LB’s wondering
how LB is going to die. No “I wonder how I am going to die” entails that I have a
first-​personal conception of myself as myself.
 Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered? 45

A self-​concept—​the vehicle of the robust first-​person perspective—​cannot

stand alone. One cannot just think of oneself without thinking something about
oneself. (This is where Hume was right when he said, “When I enter most inti-
mately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or
other” [Hume 1896, 252]. Although I agree with Hume that there is no entity that
is a self, his famous passage seems to me only to imply that one does not experi-
ence oneself in isolation; a self-​concept cannot stand alone.)
One attributes thoughts to oneself, and in order to do that, one must have a
battery of empirical concepts (“I wish that I had a truck” contains a self-​concept
[expressed by the second occurrence of “I”] and the concepts wish and truck.) So
one must have empirical concepts in order to have I* thoughts. In order to ac-
quire empirical concepts, one must have a public language.
This is so, because (1) empirical concepts can be both correctly applied and
misapplied to various things, and (2) the difference between correct and incor-
rect application of an ordinary empirical concept is grounded in public language.
As Wittgenstein said, without a public language, there would be no application
conditions to ground a difference between using a concept correctly and using it
incorrectly.
To see this, suppose that a nonlinguistic Ms. Brown had never had any
interactions with other people, and was stranded alone in a jungle clearing.
Could it occur to her to begin to name the things around her—​birds, trees, and
so on? If Wittgenstein is right, the answer is no: without a good deal of linguistic
and prelinguistic preparation, Ms. Brown, could not decide to name anything
at all. One could not decide to refer to anything until one had had countless
interactions with language users.
Let’s put that problem aside and suppose (per impossible) that it occurs to her
to call some birds she sees circling around, “crows.” How could Ms. Brown’s use
of the sound “crow” express any concept at all? She could not have formed the
intention to refer to crows by “crow” unless she already has significant parts of
a natural language. She could not have formed the intention to refer to the kind
of creature that she is seeing by vocalizing “crows”; in her languageless state, she
could not have acquired the concept of a kind of creature.
In the absence of a public language—​with a community of language users—​
there would be nothing that would make it the case that any of Ms. Brown’s
mental events or vocalizations expressed any concept—​crow or bird or anything
else. Suppose that one day a raven started flying around, and Ms. Brown vocal-
ized “crow!” Did she mistake a raven for a crow? How could she? There would
be no difference whatever between her emitting what sounds like “crow” in the
presence of crows and her emitting what sounds like “crow” in the presence of
ravens. Even if she could mean something by her vocalization of “crow,” there
46 Mind and Gender&Race&

would be no difference between her meaning crow and her meaning crow-​or-​
raven or her meaning bird—​unless she already had mastered a language.
Ms. Brown’s putative concept does not have an extension that would make
her use of what sounds like “crow” on a given occasion right or wrong. Any re-
cord that Ms. Brown tried to make of her observations (by, say, marking a tree
when she saw what she wanted to call “crow”) would be right. Whatever seems
right to her is right: “And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’ ”
(Wittgenstein 1953, 92e). So what sounds like “crow” in the mouth of an isolated
Ms. Brown does not express any qualitative concept.
What’s true of the concept expressed by the English word “crow” is also true
of the mundane empirical concepts that are needed for thoughts that contain a
self-​concept. For example, if I wonder whether I* have enough income to retire,
I must have a self-​concept and the qualitative concepts income and retirement.
Acquisition of those concepts requires a public language. If I thought that income
was only what was in my bank account, I would be corrected by my financial
adviser.
In short: in order to have a robust first-​person perspective, one must have a
self-​concept (expressed by “I*”); and in order to have a self-​concept, one must
have a store of empirical concepts whose acquisition depends on a public
language—​at least for beings like us.
Before turning to issues concerning gender, let me emphasize the impor-
tance of the robust first-​person perspective. Not only is it unique to persons,
but it is presupposed by many (perhaps most) recognizably human activities.
For example, we vote, we pursue graduate degrees, we make wills, we perform
speech acts like pledging allegiance to the flag, swearing to tell the truth, making
commitments. All of these activities—​the list is endless—​presuppose that the
speaker or thinker has a robust first-​person perspective. For example, the voter
must be thinking of herself (qua herself) as voting; the person pursuing a grad-
uate degree must think of herself as one pursuing a graduate degree, the person
making a will not only must think of herself as making a will, but she must certify
that she made that will. And if one pledges allegiance to the flag, one pledges her
own allegiance.

The Relation of the Robust First-​Person Perspective

to Gender Identity

In this section, I shall show the relevance of the robust first-​person perspective
to gender identity. I shall argue that any having attitudes whatever toward one’s
gender depends on having a robust first-​person perspective. (Although in the
past, I have presented the first-​person perspective as an essential property of
 Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered? 47

persons, my essentialism is not relevant to the issues at hand. So, in deference to

the overwhelming number of feminists who are antiessentialists, I’ll regard the
first-​person perspective here as simply an important property of persons.)
The robust first-​person perspective is presupposed even by the meanings of
such neutral phrases as “attitudes toward one’s biological sex.” This phrase means
attitudes toward one’s own biological sex conceived of from the first person as
one’s own. Such attitudes entail that there are robust first-​person perspectives.
Moreover, if everyone has some attitudes or other toward his or her biological
sex—​even if the attitude is one of indifference or rejection or bewilderment—​
then we have the general proposition: “For all x, if x is a person, then x has some
attitude toward her (own) biological sex.” This may look like an impersonal
claim, but it’s not. The claim embeds attribution of a first-​person reference; since
“attitude toward her (own) biological sex” requires that the subject have a self-​
concept, one cannot have an attitude about her own biological sex unless she has
a robust first-​person perspective. The relation between one’s gender identity and
one’s self-​concept is that having a gender identity—​having any attitudes at all to-
ward one’s biological sex—​itself presupposes having a self-​concept.
Although one cannot have any gender identity without having a robust first-​
person perspective, can one have a robust first-​person perspective without
having gender identity? On my view, one essentially has a body, but in certain
pathological cases, one may believe oneself to be disembodied. In that case, if
one might (wrongly) believe that one was disembodied, one could have a robust
first-​person perspective without a gender identity. However, in normal cases,
where one knows that one has a body, having a robust first-​person perspective
brings with it attitudes toward one’s body, and hence attitudes toward one’s bi-
ological sex. Of course, this puts no constraints on the content of the attitudes
(pride, revulsion); it is only that in psychologically normal cases, anyone with a
robust first-​person perspective has gender identity. Indeed, gender identity may
well develop along with the robust first-​person perspective. Some research is
needed here.
My point here is that the robust first-​person perspective and the language that
manifests it are immediately relevant to issues of gender identity, inasmuch as
one’s attitudes about one’s sex all require a robust first-​person perspective, and
other people’s attitudes toward one as an exemplar of a gender are conveyed by
means of language. So we have good reason to ask further:

Is the Robust First-​Person Perspective Itself Gendered?

To ask whether the robust first-​person perspective is gendered is to ask whether

the robust first-​person perspective itself introduces the attitudes, feelings, and
48 Mind and Gender&Race&

behaviors that one’s society associates with one’s biological sex. To see how a ro-
bust first-​person perspective could be marked for gender, recall that to acquire
a robust first-​person perspective, one must have mastered language of a certain
complexity. To learn a language is not just to match words and things. To learn
a language is, in effect, to learn a world; a young child learns what it is proper to
do and to say and under what conditions it is to be done or said.3 And without
realizing it, people pick up almost-​hidden differences in gender. For example,
women giggle (silly creatures), while men chuckle (they acknowledge attempts
at wit). No one is explicitly taught to say more often of women that they giggle,
not chuckle, or of men that they chuckle, not giggle. And chuckling is ostensibly
not normative. Nevertheless, to say “men chuckle” where “women giggle” is to
convey a stereotype: men are taken more seriously than women. Another ex-
ample, from which I would draw the same conclusion: men yell (righteous indig-
nation) and women shriek (out-​of-​control emotion).
In learning a language, one learns norms and expectations, as well as the way
things are (Wittgenstein 1953). Language is a repository of “gender schemas,”
construed as “sets of largely unconscious beliefs about men and women that con-
dition our perceptions and shape our normative expectations” (Antony 2012,
227). And the world that young children get to know via language learning
comes laden with implicit gender bias. For example, women “are subject to a
gendered norm that assigns to them primary responsibility for childcare, elder
care, socializing, and housework” (Antony 2012, 237). Young girls and young
boys learn such norms as they learn a language; and as they acquire robust first-​
person perspectives, they learn to apply the norms to themselves.
So one acquires attitudes as one learns a language. Nevertheless, the language
(English, say) may be home to a plethora of inconsistent attitudes, and which
particular attitudes a child acquires depends on the local norms. But even know-
ledge of the local norms is insufficient to predict which particular attitudes a
child will acquire: Two sisters, brought up among the same local norms, may
acquire very different attitudes toward gender by the time that they reach the ro-
bust stage of the first-​person perspective. Although both sisters may know that
playing with dolls is approved behavior for girls and climbing trees is not, one
sister may see herself as a future mother who plays with dolls, while the other
sister sees herself as a tomboy who climbs trees. Both these attitudes manifest
the robust first-​person perspective, and both these behaviors—​playing with
dolls and acting as a tomboy—​are associated with girls. So even though gender-​
specific ideas seep into the language that is the vehicle for the robust first-​person
perspective, the robust first-​person perspective itself is not responsible for which
gender-​specific language attitudes a child acquires.
One reason for this is that the robust first-​person perspective is a (stage
of) a formal property. Although a dispositional property, it is not like being
 Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered? 49

disposed to tell the truth or being disposed to eat apples. The robust first-​
person perspective itself has no qualitative character whatever. It is simply the
(nonqualitative) capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first person.
This capacity is manifested in any array of attitudes that a person has about
herself as herself*.
The robust first-​person attitudes that one has toward oneself are manifestations
of one’s self-​concept. The self-​concept itself is merely the concept-​of-​oneself-​
as-​oneself*. How one manifests a self-​concept depends on numerous environ-
mental circumstances. We inherit all sorts of attitudes, feelings, and behavior
from the language(s) we learn. Before a child reaches maturity, some of these
attitudes, feelings, and behavior make up their gender schemas. Gender identity
is a mixture of attitudes one has about oneself* (the robust first-​person perspec-
tive again) and attitudes about female and male genders.
The same capacity (the robust first-​person perspective) may be manifested in
inconsistent ways by (perhaps) different people. For example, one sister is dis-
posed to become a pathologist, and the other is disposed to become a stay-​at-​
home mother who keeps a lovely and welcoming house. There’s no difference
here in the capacity at issue; the difference resides only in its manifestations. And
of course, one’s attitudes may change dramatically as one has wider experience
and learns more about the world. However, attitudes that define gender may be
especially intransigent, and harder to change than, say, attitudes about Georgian
architecture.
Having seen that gender identity of any sort entails having a robust first-​
person perspective, let’s ask the converse question: Does one’s first-​personal
concept of oneself entail one’s gender identity? Clearly, no. For one thing,
some people do, and others do not, regard their gender as part of who they
are. For some people, one’s identity is closely tied to gender (think of macho
cowboys swaggering down the street, or coy girls flirting), but for others,
one’s gender is just a contingent fact, like the color of one’s hair. A robust
first-​person perspective is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for
one’s gender identity.
In sum, although gender identity, as a matter of attitudes along with associated
feelings and behaviors about oneself, clearly presupposes a robust first-​person
perspective, the particular attitudes that one has are not a result of the robust
first-​person perspective per se. (This point holds no matter how we end up indi-
viduating sexes, whether in a binary or along a “continuum.”)
That is, it is not the robust first-​person perspective that determines one’s
gender or one’s attitudes toward gender. The robust first-​person perspective just
makes it possible to have such attitudes. The role of the robust first-​person per-
spective with respect to gender identity is to give us the resources to have and to
exhibit whatever gender identity-​related attitudes that we have.
50 Mind and Gender&Race&

How the Robust First-​Perspective Underwrites

Gender Freedom

I’ll use the neologism “gender freedom” to be the view that one has some control
over the gender schemas that one manifests. To some extent, perhaps after re-
flection, therapy, or just life experience, one can choose between gender schemas
that carry implicit bias against girls and women on the one hand, and those that
accord to girls and women equal respect and dignity on the other hand. Since
the robust first-​person perspective is not a qualitative property, it can stand be-
hind any attitude that manifests one’s capacity to think of oneself as oneself*.
Even if the language that one first learns as a toddler—​the language that initially
shapes manifestations of one’s self-​concept—​carries with it gender norms that
undervalue being a girl, one need not be saddled with debilitating norms—​at
least this is so if one is fortunate enough to be brought up in a (relatively) free
local environment.
Maturity, I believe, is to a certain extent a matter of coming to understand the
worldview that one has unconsciously absorbed, especially the parts pertaining
to gender (along with the parts concerning race and class), then evaluating the
inherited worldview, and perhaps trying to change one’s outlook with more or less
success. As we grow up, our attitudes relating to gender may change, and hence
our gender identity changes. Reflective people may consciously try to change their
attitudes and behaviors. The gender identity of transgender people does not match
some or all of their biological and anatomical features. Intersexual persons are
almost always taught to identify themselves* as either male or female. Whether
they deal with the mismatch by undergoing surgery or by trying to change their
attitudes and hence their gender identity, maturity means that they come to terms
with the mismatch and take responsibility for what they do about it. (Even when
there is no mismatch, but certain privileges are built in to being cisgender, people
should come to terms with what their privileged position means.)

Can There Be Robust First-​Person Perspectives

without Gender?

The multiplicity of biological sexes leads to a final question: Could we change

society in such a way that there are people with robust first-​person perspectives
but without any gender schemas at all? Could “I*” play a role in thought and ac-
tion, as it does now, if there were no gender at all? Can we even imagine such a
possibility?
I think that a world without gender schemas, and hence without gender
differences, is conceptually possible (though not, I suspect, desirable). Here is
 Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered? 51

a thought experiment that at least suggests that society could be reconfigured in

such a way that we would have no need for gender schemas, in which case per-
haps the gender distinction between men and women—​or rather, between mas-
culine and feminine—​would wither away.
I am thinking of two changes—​one social-​normative, the other technological-​
normative. First the social-​normative change: complete equality of men and
women, with respect to sex and gender, and with respect to sexual partners. Any
two mutually consenting adults would be welcome to choose each other as a
long-​term or short-​term sexual partners. There would be no gender roles; there
would be no difference in pay for men and women; a person would be eligible for
any job that he or she could do. The roles of mother and father would (perhaps
slowly) change into a single role of parent. The race really would be to the swift.
Besides this social-​normative change, imagine a technological-​normative
change introducing machines that can produce new people with almost no
involvement of existing people. In effect, artificial insemination would be
augmented by artificial gestation. The technological part of the technological-​
normative change would be to harvest eggs and sperm from people at puberty.
(Think of a mature person as a castrato or a female who has undergone infertility-​
inducing surgery.) Human eggs that had been harvested from pubescent girls
would be fertilized in machines by sperm harvested from pubescent boys and
men, and then implanted in an artificial uterus, where they would develop as
fetuses do now.
The normative part of the technological-​normative change, of course, would be
inducing puberty-​aged boys and girls and their parents as well as grown people to
undergo what we might call “sex-​harvesting.” With these two (imaginary!) changes,
there would be no need for gender identity or gender attitudes at all. Maybe there
would be a period during which gender attitudes would just be vestigial, followed by
their disappearance altogether. I do not suppose that such changes would be either
likely or desirable, but they seem to be conceptually and metaphysically possible.
Still, even if the technological and normative changes envisaged by the thought ex-
periment are possible, given the kind of entities that we are, they may be impossible
for us. (Analogously, it may be logically and conceptually possible for everyone to
ignore all their offspring, or “to sit quietly (but comfortably?) on a chair of nails,”
without its being possible for entities like us [Cavell 1979, 111].) Since we do not
know whether the changes envisaged by the thought experiment are really possible
for us, perhaps the best response is to leave open the question of whether it is pos-
sible to enact the robust first-​person perspective without gender.
This thought experiment seems conceptually and metaphysically possible
(and perhaps even physically possible). If so, then we would continue to have
I*-​thoughts without any distinctions of gender whatever. In that case, we could
conclude that the first-​person perspective really is gender-​free.
52 Mind and Gender&Race&

If the (fantastical) changes are not possible for us, then perhaps the robust
first-​person perspective is gendered in the sense that everyone who has it has
some gender or another. In that case, we should conclude that the robust first-​
person perspective is gendered, but not in a way that automatically leads to
gender inequality. Rather, it could lead to a myriad of ways of organizing human
activity, many of which would be explicitly liberatory.

The Upshot

To sum up, it is not the robust first-​person perspective per se that confers gender
schemas, but rather environmental factors that affect one as one learns a lan-
guage and acquires a robust first-​person perspective. The robust first-​person
perspective, from which we can conceive of ourselves as ourselves in the first
person, confers on us myriad unique abilities: we can imagine different ways of
life; we can enter into others’ experience; we can think about (and misrepresent)
our own inner states. We can lie; we can play-​act; we can try to become more
empathetic. Importantly, we can envisage ourselves and our world in ways that
are not in fact actual. This capacity, which any of us may use to shape ourselves,
makes gender contingent, and (up to a point) discretionary for us.
People with robust first-​person perspectives may divide into two (or more)
groups that are distinguished by being stereotypically feminine (for example,
seeing oneself as a housekeeper rather than as a football player) or by being ster-
eotypically masculine (for example, seeing oneself as a navy SEAL rather than an
elder-​caregiver). However—​and this is at the heart of my view—​such division is
not inherent in the first-​person perspective itself: de facto at any given time, we
all may be one of two genders, but de jure we are not. The robust stage of the first-​
person perspective makes room for a gender-​fluid, gender-​nonbinary, gender-​
free, or freely gendered world.
So I conclude that we can join Dostoyevsky in saying that life may be a
messy affair, but at least it is life and not a series of extractions of square roots
(Dostoevsky 1988, 35).

Notes

1. I am enormously grateful to Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny for incisive comments
and guidance.
2. There is a vast feminist literature that treats issues relevant to my chapter. See, for ex-
ample, Gatens (1991) and Heinämaa (1997).
3. See Lugones (this volume).
 Is the First-Person Perspective Gendered? 53

References
American Psychological Association. 2011. “Definition of Terms: Sex, Gender, Gender
Identity, Sexual Orientation.” http://​onli​nere​sour​cesa​lex.wee​bly.com/​uplo​ads/​1/​7/​2/​9/​
17295​132/​gender​_v​ s._​sex.pdf.
Antony, Louise. 2012. “Different Voices or Perfect Storm: Why Are There So Few Women
in Philosophy?” Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3): 227–​55.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2000. Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2013. Naturalism and the First-​Person Perspective. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2015. “Human Beings as Social Entities.” Journal of Social Ontology
1 (1): 77–​87.
Castañeda, Héctor-​Neri. 1966. “He: A Study in the Logic of Self-​Consciousness.” Ratio 8
(4): 130–​57.
Castañeda, Héctor-​Neri. 1967. “Indicators and Quasi-​Indicators.” American Philosophical
Quarterly 4 (2): 85–​100.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1988. Notes from Underground. Translated by Jesse Coulson.
London: Penguin.
Fausto-​Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of
Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
Gatens, Moira. 1991. “A Critique of the Sex Gender Distinction.” In A Reader in Feminist
Knowledge, edited by Sneja Gunew, 139–​57. New York: Routledge.
Heinämaa, Sara. 1997. “What Is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of
Sexual Difference.” Hypatia 12 (1): 20–​39.
Hume, David. 1896. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by Selby-​Bigge. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.
New York: Macmillan.
 2
Computing Machinery and
Sexual Difference
The Sexed Presuppositions Underlying the Turing Test
Amy Kind

In his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing pro-
posed that we can determine whether a machine thinks by considering whether
it can succeed at a simple imitation game.1 A neutral questioner communicates
with two different systems, one a machine and one a human being, without
knowing which is which. If after some reasonable amount of time the machine is
able to fool the questioner into identifying it as the human, the machine wins the
game, and we should conclude that it thinks. This imitation game, now known as
the Turing test, has been much discussed by philosophers of mind, and for more
than half a century there has been considerable debate about whether it is an
adequate test for thinking. But what has not been much discussed are the sexed
presuppositions underlying the test. Too often forgotten in the philosophical dis-
cussion is the fact that Turing’s imitation game is modeled on an imitation game
in which a neutral questioner communicates with two different humans, one a
man and one a woman, without knowing which is which. In this original imita-
tion game—​what I’ll call the “man/​woman imitation game”—​the man wins if he
is able to fool the questioner into identifying him as the woman.
Thus arises the question motivating this chapter: How has philosophical en-
gagement with the issue of computer intelligence been influenced by the com-
parison to sexual differentiation—​what I will call “the sex analogy”—​on which
it is based? In what follows, I begin with two competing interpretations of the
Turing test that we find in the literature, one that ignores the man/​woman imita-
tion game altogether and another that does not. As I will suggest, however, even
on the interpretation that acknowledges Turing’s reliance on the man/​woman
imitation game, the significance of the sex analogy has not been adequately
explored. In the second half of this chapter, I thus turn to such an exploration. As
we will see, the fact that the Turing test was modeled on a man/​woman imitation
game seems to have led us astray in various ways in our attempt to conduct an ef-
fective investigation and assessment of computer intelligence.

Amy Kind, Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0003
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 55

The Standard Interpretation

The original imitation game involves a man and a woman serving as the two
contestants plus a neutral questioner who may be either a man or a woman.
Turing uses the labels “A” for the man, “B” for the woman, and “C” for the neutral
questioner. Each participant is in a separate room and they communicate with
one another electronically. C, who does not know which participant is in which
room, aims to make this determination. While A’s object is to try to fool C into
identifying him as the woman, B’s object is to try to help C. In describing the kind
of exchange that might take place as the questioner attempts to determine which
participant is which, Turing supposes that C might ask about the length of the
participants’ hair. Were C to ask this of A—​the participant who, though actually
a man, is trying to convince the questioner that he is a woman—​Turing reports
that A might respond with something like the following: “My hair is shingled
and the longest strands are about nine inches long” (Turing 1950, 434). (We
will return to this specific example later on in the section titled “The Exegetical
Question.”)
Only once the man/​woman imitation game is fully described does Turing
move on to introduce his now famous test. The test emerges directly from the
original man/​woman imitation game with just one simple change: the machine
replaces participant A. Interestingly, however, though Turing himself relies
heavily on the man/​woman imitation game in developing his test, this reliance
has been largely ignored in the secondary literature. Looking at various prom-
inent overviews of the Turing test, for example, one finds that they explain the
test without any reference whatsoever to the fact that it arises within a context
involving a focus on sex (or sex and gender).2
Consider, for example, the entry on the Turing test in the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, perhaps the most highly regarded philosophical reference work
available today.3 The fact that the human/​machine imitation game is modeled
on a man/​woman imitation game receives no mention at all when the game is
described:

Turing (1950) describes the following kind of game. Suppose that we have a
person, a machine, and an interrogator. The interrogator is in a room separated
from the other person and the machine. The object of the game is for the in-
terrogator to determine which of the other two is the person and which is the
machine. (Oppy and Dowe 2016, 5)

We see a similar omission in discussion of the Turing test in the relevant

entries of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Moor 1998), Blackwell’s A
Companion to Philosophy of Mind (Guttenplan 1994), the Oxford Companion to
56 Mind and Gender&Race&

Consciousness (French 2009), and many comparable reference works. Even when
it is acknowledged that Turing’s own description of the game proceeds slightly
differently from the description being provided, or in the rare cases when it is
acknowledged that Turing’s man/​machine imitation game is based on a man/​
woman imitation game, these facts are dismissed as unimportant or irrelevant to
the key matter at hand. As French puts it, though Turing provides a description
that is “slightly more complicated” than the one that he himself provides, “there
is essentially universal agreement that the additional complexity of the original
version adds nothing of substance to its slightly simplified reformulation that we
refer to today as the Turing test” (French 2009, 642).4
French’s claim of nearly universal agreement is perhaps something of an
overstatement, as we will see in just a moment. But it is certainly true that
such agreement is widespread. Indeed, even Turing’s biographer dismisses the
original formulation of the game in terms of a man/​woman imitation game
as a “red herring” (Hodges 1983, 415). We thus arrive at what is often called
the standard interpretation of the Turing test, an interpretation that treats it
as an imitation game in which a computer aims to imitate a human being.
According to the standard interpretation, the question at issue for the neu-
tral interrogator is one of species-​differentiation: Which of the two beings with
whom I am communicating is a member of the human species and which
is not?5

A Minority Interpretation

Against the standard interpretation, a small cadre of philosophers have offered

a different interpretation of the Turing test, one that takes the original man/​
woman imitation game to have considerably more significance.6 On this mi-
nority interpretation, Turing aims not to offer a species-​differentiation test but
a sex-​differentiation test. Just as the man in the original imitation game aims
to convince the neutral questioner that he is a woman, so too the computer in
the revised imitation game aims to convince the neutral questioner that it is a
woman. This interpretation gains at least partial support from Turing’s initial de-
scription of the test. Consider the key passage from Turing:

We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of
A [the man] in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when
the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man
and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”
(Turing 1950, 434)
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 57

In shifting from the man/​woman imitation game to the imitation game involving
the machine, Turing notes explicitly that the man is to be replaced with the ma-
chine. Since the man’s aim in the original game is to fool the interrogator into
identifying him as the woman, and since Turing does not say anything about the
aim of the game having changed, philosophers who offer this minority interpre-
tation claim that the Turing test is not intended to be a species test at all.
As Saul Traiger argues, referring specifically to the passage from Turing just
quoted:

The interpretation of this paragraph is crucial. We are to substitute a machine,

specifically a digital computer, for A in the game. But substituting one player for
another in a game presupposes the identity of the game. So nothing about the
game has changed. We merely have a different individual, one who happens to
be a digital computer, taking on the role of A. The machine, as A, is to cause C to
believe that A is a woman. (Traiger 2000, 565)

Likewise, as Judith Genova puts it:

Obviously, those who eliminate gender from the game assume that when
Turing says, “Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often as when the game
is played like this,” he means by ‘this’ something like, between a computer and
a person, with the object now being to discover which is machine and which is
human. However, there is no prima facie reason to change the basic question of
the game. ‘Like this,’ can just as well mean, with the machine imitating a man
with the object remaining to distinguish between genders. (Genova 1994, 314)

Thus, on this minority interpretation, Turing did not intend for the interro-
gator to try to figure out which being is the human but rather to try to figure
out which being is the woman.7 Here the test for intelligence is an indirect one.
The machine can be said to pass the test—​and thus to count as intelligent—​if it
manages to fool the interrogator into identifying it as the woman as often as the
man had managed to fool the interrogator into identifying him as the woman.
The thought seems to be something like this: If a computer is as good at this kind
of sophisticated imitation task as a man is, then we can infer intelligence on the
part of the computer.
What’s the upshot of interpreting Turing in this fashion? Several of the
philosophers who offer this minority interpretation take the primary signifi-
cance to lie in the difficulty of the task facing the machine. That’s not to say that
they take imitating a woman to be easier than imitating a human of unspecified
sex. Rather, the difficulty lies in the fact that in the species-​differentiation test the
58 Mind and Gender&Race&

interrogator knows that one of the participants is the machine whereas in the
sex-​differentiation test, this thought does not even enter the interrogator’s mind.8
Unlike proponents of the standard interpretation, then, proponents of the
minority interpretation argue that the man/​woman imitation game cannot
be ignored when understanding the Turing test. In doing so, however, such
proponents deny that we should assign any particular importance to sex. While
this may initially seem surprising, it actually coheres nicely with their explana-
tion of the significance of their interpretation. If the important difference be-
tween the minority interpretation’s view of the Turing test and the standard
interpretation’s view of the Turing test is that only the former keeps the inter-
rogator ignorant of the fact that one of the contestants in the game is a machine,
then there needn’t be any special reason that we model the Turing test on a game
involving participants of two different sexes as opposed to different nationali-
ties or political alignments. Granted, we may not be able to sub in just any pair
of contrasting identities here. Traiger suggests that it be important that there be
some sort of cultural alignment among participants (Traiger 2000, 570), while
Sterrett suggests that the contrasting identities must be such that the imitator
is required to reflect critically on what kinds of responses to give (Sterrett 2000,
550). But the fact remains that, even on the minority interpretation, the focus on
sex itself is not seen as an especially important one.
Here Genova’s work constitutes a notable exception. As is by now well known,
Turing struggled with his sexual identity throughout his lifetime, and this
struggle is often thought to have played a direct role in his suicide.9 Drawing on
these biographical details, Genova argues that Turing’s work “confirms the belief
in a close interaction between the personal and the intellectual affirmed by many
feminist and cultural critics today” (Genova 1994, 324). In particular, Turing’s
use of the man/​woman imitation game enabled him to confuse men, women,
and machines, and thereby demonstrate “that no boundaries were sacred or un-
breachable. All rules, all categories, all boundaries were made to be transgressed”
(Genova 1994, 317). Indeed, Genova sees Turing’s inclusion of the machine in
the man/​woman imitation game as enabling him to deconstruct this binary and,
moreover, that “the evolution of thinking machines might provide a solution to
the strangling binarism” that comes along with the differentiation between the
sexes (Genova 1994, 315–​316).
In this way, Genova sees Turing’s initial use of a man/​woman imitation game
as both deliberate and essential, and she thereby takes a position that sets her
apart not only from both the proponents of the standard interpretation but also
from other proponents of the minority interpretation. Yet this also reveals some-
thing interesting. In bringing sex to the forefront of the discussion, Genova’s
reflections suggest a way in which our thinking about sex might be influenced
by the analogy with computer intelligence. Importantly, however, this still tells
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 59

us nothing about the ways in which our thinking about computer intelligence
might be influenced by the analogy with sex. Thus, even here, in a paper rare
among the philosophical literature on the Turing test for its assignment of im-
portance to Turing’s invocation of the sexes qua the sexes, the question that
motivates the discussion of this chapter—​how the sex analogy has influenced
our thinking about computer intelligence—​remains unaddressed.

The Exegetical Question

Now that we have distinguished the minority interpretation from the standard
interpretation, the question naturally arises as to which interpretation is the
correct one. Though I will not here attempt to settle this exegetical question, it’s
worth noting some important textual evidence in support of the standard in-
terpretation over the minority interpretation. In particular, it’s difficult to make
sense of some of the discussion of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” if
Turing did not have a species-​differentiation test in mind. Consider, for example,
this passage concerning the appropriate strategy for the machine to adopt in
attempting to win the game:

It might be urged that when playing the “imitation game” the best strategy for
the machine may possibly be something other than imitation of the behaviour
of a man. This may be, but I think it is unlikely that there is any great effect of
this kind. In any case there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the
game, and it will be assumed that the best strategy is to try to provide answers
that would naturally be given by a man. (Turing 1950, 435)

If Turing intended a sex-​differentiation test, then the machine (who is taking

the place of A, the man, in the original man/​woman imitation game) would be
aiming to convince the neutral questioner that it is a woman. Thus, one would
expect to see Turing here talking about the behavior of a woman and answers that
would naturally be given by a woman.
While passages like this are by no means decisive, they are at least strongly
suggestive that Turing had a species-​differentiation test in mind. But, as noted
above, I won’t here attempt to settle the exegetical question. Ultimately the ques-
tion of which interpretation is the correct one is something of a red herring for
the issue I here pursue, that is, the issue of how the sex analogy has influenced
the subsequent discussion of computer intelligence. Whatever Turing himself in-
tended, the vast majority of philosophical engagement with the Turing test has
proceeded against the backdrop of the standard interpretation. Our exploration
of the sex analogy must thus operate within that framework, that is, within the
60 Mind and Gender&Race&

framework of the Turing test understood as a species test. This gives us the fol-
lowing formulation of the question in which I am interested: How has our under-
standing of that species-​differentiation test been influenced by the fact that it was
modeled on a sex-​differentiation test?
As I will argue in what follows, thinking of a questioner’s determination of in-
telligence on the model of a questioner’s determination of sex has had several un-
fortunate consequences for philosophical thinking about computer intelligence.
I’ll focus on three such consequences in particular:

(1) The sex analogy has encouraged us to think of intelligence as a certain

kind of all-​or-​nothing, fixed property;
(2) The sex analogy has encouraged us to think about superficial markers of
intelligence; and
(3) The sex analogy has encouraged us to think of the machine as pretending
to be something that it is not.

In the next three sections, I take up each of these consequences in turn.

Intelligence as All or Nothing

In thinking about all three of the consequences that I will be exploring, it’s im-
portant to remember that Turing was operating with a mid-​twentieth-​century
conception of one’s sex. This point is especially critical in thinking about the first
of our three consequences. According to the conception operative in the middle
of the twentieth century, people fall into exactly one of two categories when it
comes to sex: man or woman. Moreover, which category someone falls into was
not considered to be open to change. Though neither of these assumptions cur-
rently holds much sway, at the time Turing was writing, sex was thought to be
both binary and fixed.10
In taking the man/​woman imitation game to be an appropriate model for a
test for intelligence, Turing thereby seems to be thinking of intelligence in an
analogous way as both binary and fixed. The very setup of the test seems to pre-
suppose that there are exactly two categories a machine could fall into. Either
the machine is intelligent or it is not intelligent. It also seems to presuppose that
which category a machine falls into is not open to change.
In fact, it takes only a moment’s reflection to see how problematic these two
presuppositions are. In other contexts where we talk about intelligence, we are
much more likely to recognize an intelligence continuum. Consider discussions
of animal intelligence, for example—​or more specifically, consider Koko, an
eastern lowland gorilla who has been taught American Sign Language as part
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 61

of her participation in the Gorilla Language Project. According to her handlers,

Koko has a working vocabulary of over 1,000 signs and is said to understand
approximately 2,000 spoken English words. On IQ tests, where a score of 100
is considered normal for humans, Koko has scored between 70 and 95. In
discussions of Koko, her mental capacities are often compared to those of a
young child (Patterson and Gordon 1993). The discussion is not framed in terms
of whether she is intelligent, all or nothing, but rather how much intelligence we
should say that she has. We see a similar dialectic in discussions of intelligence
in other animal species. To give just one other example: Alex, an African Grey
parrot studied extensively by Irene Pepperberg, is often described as having the
intelligence of a five-​year old (Pepperberg 2009).
When we step away from a computer-​related context to other contexts in
which intelligence is discussed, we also see an important sensitivity to the idea
that where one falls on the intelligence continuum can change. Animals like
Koko and Alex may, with guidance from trainers and teachers, develop new
skills and capacities that incline us to count them as more intelligent than they
were before. This point is also an obvious one in discussions of human intelli-
gence. Intelligence develops as one grows from infant to child to adult—​though
also, in some unfortunate cases, accident or illness can lead to intelligence loss.
In none of these non-​computer-​related contexts do we see an assumption that
intelligence is fixed. Why, then, do we make such an assumption in the case of
computer intelligence? Why do we see such an assumption built into the notion
of the Turing test?11 As I am here suggesting, this problematic assumption traces
directly to the sex analogy.
Having fleshed out the problematic nature of these two presuppositions, how-
ever, we are now led to what may seem to be a counterintuitive result. It turns
out that it’s precisely because the Turing test has been taken to be a species-​
differentiation test (as assumed by proponents of the standard interpretation),
rather than a sex-​differentiation test (as assumed by proponents of the minority
interpretation), that considerations of sex end up exerting an important influ-
ence in the discussion of computer intelligence. To see this, it will be helpful
first to recall that proponents of the minority interpretation claim that Turing
intended the game to stay the same when the machine substituted in for player
A, that is, that we should see the Turing test as a sex-​differentiation test. In this
way, the neutral questioner is ignorant of the fact that one of the contestants in
the game is a machine. As we saw, however, proponents of this interpretation
also point out that Turing need not have started with a man/​woman imitation
game in order to achieve the requisite ignorance on the part of the neutral ques-
tioner. A nationality imitation game, or a political alignment imitation game,
would have worked just as well. In the context of the standard interpretation,
however, the differences between modeling the species-​differentiation test on a
62 Mind and Gender&Race&

sex-​differentiation test and modeling it on a test aimed at differentiating nation-

ality or political alignment test turn out to be critical ones.
Let’s focus on nationality for a moment, and let’s suppose that the questioner
in the nationality imitation game has to figure out which participant is the
American. Here we could have many different kinds of contestants in the role of
A: a Canadian, a Mexican, an Australian, a Korean, and so on. When the ques-
tioner identifies one of the contestants as being the American, this identification
thus carries no further implication about what nationality the other contestant
is. Nationality is not binary. The same point would apply to a political alignment
game, since political alignment also fails to be binary.
Because these characteristics are nonbinary, we also see more clearly a net-
work of overlapping similarities and differences among the various choices. The
Canadian and Australian might share a native language with the American, the
Canadian and the Mexican share geographical proximity with the American,
and so on. On some questions, then, it will likely be easier for the Australian to
imitate the American than for the Mexican, whereas on other questions it will
likely be easier for the Mexican to imitate the American than for the Australian.
Matters are similar with respect to political alignment. With respect to some
beliefs a Republican will resemble the Libertarian more than the Democrat, but
with respect to other beliefs they will resemble the Tea Partier more than the
Libertarian. So again, on some questions it will likely be easier for the Tea Partier
to imitate the Republican, whereas on other questions it will likely be easier for
the Libertarian to do so.
In fact, then, the two-​contestant imitation game format seems somewhat
unnatural when thinking about nationality or political alignment. If we were
starting from scratch in an effort to design a game whose aim was to unmask
the American, say, it seems we’d be much more likely to adopt a different format.
Perhaps we might use something more like the Dating Game setup, where there
are three contestants behind the curtain—​one American and two not. Or we
might even begin with a much larger group. By careful interaction and well-​
designed queries, the neutral questioner might eliminate possible contestants
one by one until the field is narrowed to just a single contestant left standing—​not
quite the original Dating Game, perhaps, but instead more like an anonymized
version of its millennial counterpart, The Bachelorette.
Even in these kinds of setups, there is still only one winner. Only one pan-
elist gets the date, and only one contestant gets the rose. But suppose we were to
develop a Turing test based on one of these other kinds of models. I don’t know
exactly what such a test would look like, but we might naturally think that there
would be an important sense in which a computer who placed in the middle of
the pack—​who came in second among three panelists, or who lasted into a late
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 63

round in the one-​by-​one elimination of a larger group—​could still be said to be

victorious.
The point here should in some sense be obvious: One doesn’t have to come in
first in an intelligence contest to count as intelligent. But when we’re thinking of
intelligence on the model of sex, this point gets lost. When the model at work is
one of sex, and when sex is taken to be all or nothing, intelligence too looks like
an all-​or-​nothing property. Indeed, intelligence looks like the kind of property
that species-​membership is. Either you are a human or you’re not, and likewise,
either you’re intelligent or you are not. In neither case is there any middle ground.
In this way, the test seems to encourage a way of thinking about intelligence that
unnecessarily prejudices us against the computer participant.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the influential criticisms of the Turing test
in the philosophical literature can be seen as pointing to something like this
prejudice. To take just one example, consider Robert French’s argument that
“the Test provides a guarantee not of intelligence but of culturally-​oriented
human intelligence” (French 1990, 54). In an effort to establish this point,
French offers the analogy of what he calls “the seagull test” for flight: a ma-
chine is said to be capable of flight if a neutral observer is unable to differ-
entiate the machine from a real seagull by way of a three-​dimensional radar
screen. While it seems true that any system that passes the seagull test is flight-​
capable—​that is, while it seems true that passing the seagull test is sufficient
for flight-​capability—​it also seems true that many flight-​capable systems will
be unable to pass the test, as the test sets the bar too high. The point here seems
clear: Just as flight-​capability should not be linked to being indistinguishable
from a seagull, so too should intelligence not be linked to being indistinguish-
able from a human. To assume otherwise is to be humancentric. But while this
kind of humancentric prejudice has been previously noticed, what hasn’t yet
been noticed is how such prejudice can be seen as a natural consequence of the
sex analogy with which Turing began.12
There’s a certain irony here, since one of Turing’s main aims in proposing the
test was precisely to sidestep a certain kind of prejudice that would arise from
tackling the question of computer intelligence head on. Given a mid-​century def-
inition of “thinking,” Turing worried a computer might be conceptually excluded
from counting as thinking. The concept “thinking” might simply not have been a
concept that could be applicable to a computer. The Turing test was a way to cir-
cumvent this problem, or at least, a way to postpone direct consideration of the
question, “Can a computer think?” until such time as the definition of thinking
had become sufficiently expansive to allow for a genuine assessment.13 In mod-
eling his test on a man/​woman imitation game, however, Turing showed himself
to be victim of some of the same prejudices that he was trying to avoid.
64 Mind and Gender&Race&

Superficial Markers of Intelligence

The previous section helped us to see how the sex analogy misleadingly
encourages us to think of intelligence as all or nothing. In this section, we will
look at a second way in which the sex analogy is misleading. But while the first
problem arises primarily from a way in which the sex analogy encourages a prob-
lematic characterization of intelligence itself, this problem arises from a way in
which the sex analogy encourages a problematic way of detecting intelligence. In
particular, the sex analogy seems to encourage a superficial line of questioning
by the neutral questioner, and it thus correspondingly encourages us to focus on
superficial rather than deep markers of intelligence.
Recall the kinds of question that Turing thinks the neutral questioner might
ask in the original man/​woman imitation game, namely, questions about hair
length. Even from a 1950s perspective one would expect that hair length and
other matters of appearance would be viewed as a superficial marker of sex and
not a central aspect of it. In fact, the contestants are separated from the neutral
questioner precisely so matters of appearance don’t influence the questioner’s
judgment.
Of course, the questioner might choose to probe in a different way. By forcing
the contestants to answer questions about moral dilemmas or about matters
of social justice, a questioner might be able to uncover subtle patterns of sexed
thinking lurking beneath the surface. Insofar as an awareness of such patterns
requires a nuanced understanding that would be difficult for an unsophisti-
cated participant to fake, we might think that these lines of questioning would
ultimately prove more fruitful than lines of questioning about more superficial
matters. But these lines of questioning are not among the most obvious ones that
come to mind. Rather, in an imitation game involving sex, we’re likely to be in-
clined toward questions about appearance, occupation choice, favorite pastimes
and so on—​an inclination that is promoted by Turing’s own choice of sample
question.
Ultimately, though Turing could perhaps have chosen to highlight more illu-
minating examples of sex-​related questions, to some extent the problem here
may be largely unavoidable, that is, the focus on superficial markers may well
be endemic to the very concept of a sexed imitation game. Much contemporary
work on sex and gender suggests that many of the apparent differences between
the sexes are not biologically based but rather are the products of various kinds
of socialization. As such, these differences are at least in principle changeable
and thus might not be thought to run very deep. But insofar as there are no deep
facts about sex that could manifest in a conversation with a neutral questioner,
there are no deep facts for which to test. In this respect, sex seems quite unlike
intelligence. Whether a being has intelligence does seem like a deep fact about
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 65

the being. Were we not thinking about testing for intelligence on the model of
testing for sex, we might naturally focus our attention more effectively on rooting
out that deep fact. With sex as the model, however, our attention is naturally
diverted to more superficial markers. Worries, for example, are explicitly raised
in Turing’s discussion about how fast or how flawlessly the computer might an-
swer questions about calculation. Too quick or too flawlessly, and the computer
might be inadvertently unmasked. Here we bump up against a certain irony: it’s
the computer’s superiority with respect to these superficial markers of intelli-
gence that might keep it from passing the test.
This irony brings us back to an issue that we encountered in the previous sec-
tion: Turing’s species test seems to constrain intelligence to a human mold.14
And here again, we can see how the sex analogy helps to impose this constraint.
To convince a questioner that they are a woman, participants in the man/​woman
imitation game will likely fall back on traditional conceptions of femininity and
womanhood. This will be true not only for contestant A, who is not the woman,
but also for contestant B, who is. Suppose contestant B is 5 foot 10 inches tall or
has very short hair or that she has some other physical characteristics that are
not traditionally viewed as feminine. Or suppose that she is a race car driver or
an actuary or a member of some other profession dominated by men. Speaking
truthfully about any of these characteristics will likely make it harder for B to
win the game. In this way, the man/​woman imitation game constrains sex to a
very traditional or stereotypical—​indeed, superficial—​mold. It’s thus no surprise
that a species test modeled on it would likewise constrain intelligence to a very
traditional or stereotypical—​indeed, superficial—​mold. The ability to answer
questions quickly and flawlessly matters no more to intelligence than profession
and hair length matter to sex. But, in both cases, it’s these kinds of superficial
characteristics that end up looming large.
At this point, however, an objection to my line of reasoning might naturally
arise. In describing the Turing test, Turing himself gives three different examples
of questions that might be put to the participants. The first asks the participant to
produce a sonnet, the second asks the participant to solve an addition problem,
and the last asks the participant to solve a chess problem. Since facility with po-
etry, math, and/​or chess doesn’t seem in any way a superficial marker of intelli-
gence, the point pushed in this section might well seem unfounded.
In response to this potential objection, I think it’s useful to return to a point
that I made in the previous section, namely, that the notion of intelligence being
employed in discussions of computer intelligence seems quite different from the
notion being employed in other contexts, for example, in discussions of animal
intelligence. The fact that Koko the gorilla and Alex the parrot cannot compose
poetry or play chess does not count against their having intelligence. Passing the
Turing test seems to require not only being able to respond like a human, but
66 Mind and Gender&Race&

being able to respond like a human over an extremely wide range of subjects.
Though having such a wide-​ranging capacity for response might well be a good
indicator of intelligence, it is by no means essential to intelligence, and a focus on
it moves us away from the deep facts about intelligence, whatever those may be.

The Pretense of Intelligence

In addition to the two problematic influences already discussed, in this final sec-
tion I’ll briefly consider an additional problem that arises from the kind of con-
trast that the sex analogy sets up. In the man/​woman imitation game, the man
is pretending to be something that he is not. The whole point of the game is for
him to try to fool the questioner into identifying him as something that he’s not.
If he wins the game, we certainly aren’t entitled to conclude that he is a woman
but rather that he’s a good pretender—​or at least that he’s a good pretender when
it comes to his sex.
This encourages us to think about the computer’s performance the same
way: just as the man is pretending to be something that he is not, the model
of the man/​woman imitation game thus encourages us to think of the com-
puter participating in the Turing test as pretending to be something that it is
not. If the computer wins the game, why would we conclude that it is intel-
ligent? Wouldn’t the appropriate conclusion simply be that it is a very good
pretender, analogous to the appropriate conclusion in the man/​woman imi-
tation game?15
In fact, the issue of pretense has played a significant role in criticisms of the
Turing test. Consider, for example, the so-​called Chinese Room thought experi-
ment proposed by John Searle. Searle offers a case in which a system might pass
the Turing test for speaking a language like Mandarin without having any under-
standing of Mandarin, a fact that each of us is supposed to be able to determine
for ourselves by imagining ourselves instantiating a computer program for the
production of Mandarin outputs (Searle 1980).
At this point, one might plausibly protest that the problem of pretense arises
not from the fact that Turing modeled his test on an imitation game involving
sex but that he modeled it on an imitation game at all. In any imitation game, the
issue of pretense will be a salient one. Worries about pretense—​that the computer
was not actually intelligent but was merely pretending to be so—​would have just
as naturally arisen had Turing chosen to focus on political alignment of nation-
ality. While this point seems undoubtedly correct, I don’t think it undermines
the point that I mean here to be making. For I think there’s good reason to be-
lieve that it’s the focus on sex that leads us to think about imitation games in the
first place.
 Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference 67

The philosophical exploration of computer intelligence prompted by Turing’s

introduction of his test is by now almost seventy years in. And while the dis-
cussion has in many ways moved away from the test itself, with numerous
commentators vehemently arguing that it has led the conversation astray, until
now little attention has been paid to the respect in which the sex analogy under-
lying the test has played a part in that conversation. As I have aimed to show in
this chapter, its part has been not only significant but also in various ways prob-
lematic. Of course, it’s impossible at this point to unwind the clock and wipe the
slate clean. But even if we cannot entirely erase the problematic influences of the
sex analogy, we can only begin to address them and work toward a corrective
once they have been identified. Though there is thus considerably more work to
be done, this chapter should serve as an important first step toward this ongoing
project.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at a session on “Feminist Philosophy

of Mind” at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association
in 2017. I am grateful to the audience there for helpful feedback. Thanks also to Keya
Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny for their incisive and helpful feedback.
2. Though I here say “sex and gender,” it is important to note that Turing was writing at
a time before the sex/​gender distinction was in place. (The distinction is often traced
to Stoller (1968); see Mikkola (2017) for a useful overview.) In order to avoid anach-
ronism, and also to better capture what Turing had in mind, I tend to talk in terms of
“sex” rather than “gender” in what follows.
3. For a discussion of the prominence of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, see
Sonnad (2015).
4. See also Saygin et al. (2000, 467).
5. In addition to the writers mentioned in the text above, the standard interpretation
is also offered by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, two philosophers who have
(both jointly and individually) written extensively on Turing’s work. See, for example,
Proudfoot and Copeland (2012).
6. See Genova (1994), Hayes and Ford (1995), Sterrett (2000), Traiger (2000), and Lenat
(2008).
7. Interestingly, Lenat suggests that we can attribute the dominance of the standard in-
terpretation to “political correctness.” See Lenat (2008, 273–​274). I do not have the
space to engage this suggestion here.
8. See, for example, Hayes and Ford (1995, 972), Traiger (2000, 565), and Lenat
(2008, 274).
9. See Hodges (1983) for extensive discussion of Turing’s struggles with his sexuality.
10. Indeed, the view that gender is both fixed and binary was still the prevailing view
in the 1990s. In pushing back against this binarism in her famous article “The Five
68 Mind and Gender&Race&

Sexes,” Anne Fausto-​Sterling notes that “Western culture is deeply committed to the
idea that there are only two sexes” (Fausto-​Sterling 1993, 20).
11. Of course, subsequent to the publication of Turing’s paper, there has been consider-
able work in computer science and artificial intelligence toward enabling machines
to learn. The existence of such work, however, does not undermine my point in the
text above about the presuppositions built into the Turing test. Whatever the progress
on learning computers that has been made, such presuppositions have nonetheless
exerted an influence in the philosophical exploration of computer intelligence.
12. French, for example, argues persuasively that part of the problem with the Turing
test is that it “admits of no degrees” in its determination of intelligence and that there
is a problem with any kind of test that fails to recognize an intelligence continuum
(French 1990, 57). But in making this argument, French does not seem to notice
the way in which this failure on the part of the Turing test seems to trace to the sex
analogy on which it is based.
13. See, for example, the following passage: “The original question, ‘Can machines
think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe
that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have
altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting
to be contradicted” (Turing 1950, 442).
14. In fact, the constraint is even narrower than this, since there seems a presumption
that the human contestant is a Western, neurotypical adult.
15. In fact, this issue of pretense might well be one reason why the model of the man/​
woman imitation game often drops out of the discussion. Insofar as it seems plau-
sible that simulating intelligence may be good enough for intelligence, while still
remaining implausible that simulating being a woman is good enough for being a
woman, we have reason to think that the analogy should be dismissed as irrelevant—​
as just a way to get the conversation started.

References
Fausto-​Sterling, Anne. 1993. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.”
The Sciences 33 (2): 20–​25.
French, Robert. 1990. “Subcognition and the Limits of the Turing Test.” Mind 99
(393): 53–​65.
French, Robert. 2009. “The Turing Test.” In Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited
by Timothy Bayne, Axel Cleeremans, and Patrick Wilken, 641–​643. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Genova, Judith. 1994. “Turing’s Sexual Guessing Game.” Social Epistemology 8
(4): 313–​326.
Guttenplan, Samuel. 1994. “Alan Turing.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed-
ited by Samuel Guttenplan, 594–​596. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hayes, Patrick, and Kenneth Ford. 1995. “Turing Test Considered Harmful.” Proceedings
of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI 95
(1): 972–​977.
Hodges, Andrew. 1983. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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Lenat, Douglas B. 2008. “Building a Machine Smart Enough to Pass the Turing Test: Could
We, Should We, Will We?” In Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological
Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer, edited by Robert Epstein, Gary Roberts,
and Grace Beber, 261–​282. Dordrecht: Springer.
Mikkola, Mari. 2017. “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender.” In Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​archi​ves/​sum2​
017/​entr​ies/​femin​ism-​gen​der/​.
Moor, James H. 1988. “Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–​54).” In The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, edited by Tim Crane. https://​www-​rep-​routle​dge-​com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/​
artic​les/​biogr​aphi​cal/​tur​ing-​alan-​mathi​son-​1912-​54/​v-​1.
Oppy, Graham, and David Dowe. 2016. “The Turing Test.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​archi​ves/​spr2​016/​
entr​ies/​tur​ing-​test/​.
Patterson, Francine, and Wendy Gordon. 1993. “The Case for the Personhood of
Gorillas.” In The Great Ape Project, edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, 58–​75.
New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Pepperberg, Irene M. 2009. Alex and Me. New York: Harper.
Proudfoot, Diane, and Jack Copeland. 2012. “Artificial Intelligence.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, edited by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels,
and Stephen P. Stich, 147–​182. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saygin, Ayse Pinar, Ilyas Cicekli, and Varol Akman. 2000. “Turing Test: 50 Years Later.”
Minds and Machines 10 (4): 463–​518.
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(3): 417–​424.
Sonnad, Nikhil. 2015. “This Free Online Encyclopedia Has Achieved What Wikipedia
Can Only Dream Of.” Quartz. September 21. https://​qz.com/​480​741/​this-​free-​onl​ine-​
encyc​lope​dia-​has-​achie​ved-​what-​wikipe​dia-​can-​only-​dream-​of/​.
Sterrett, Susan G. 2000. “Turing’s Two Tests for Intelligence.” Minds and Machines: Journal
for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science 10 (4): 541–​559.
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Turing, Alan. 1950. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59 (236): 433–​460.
 3
Toward a Feminist Theory
of Mental Content
Keya Maitra

This chapter grows out of my dual conviction that a theory of mental content
needs to be shaped by feminist concerns, and feminist theorizing and activism
need to be informed by a feminist theory of mental content.1 A feminist theory
of content allows us to appreciate the nuanced role that historical and soci-
ocultural forces play in shaping the content of many of our terms—​a hitherto
underexplored dimension of a major topic in philosophy of mind.2 Using as an
example José Jorge Mendoza’s analysis of how the history of US immigration and
citizenship law has shaped the term “whiteness,” my chapter argues that feminist
theorizing and activism stand to benefit from the possibility of a feminist theory
of mental content that makes explicit how the contents of many terms with social
and political import are determined and held stable.
Interestingly though, the question of mental content—​arguably one of the
central topics in philosophy of mind—​seems to get very little attention from
feminist philosophers. Feminist reluctance to engage with the discussion of
mental content in philosophy of mind is fair. Insofar as the social and political
makings of our reality have been treated as mostly irrelevant to the objective un-
derstanding of mental phenomena that philosophers of mind pursue, feminists
would find little incentive in joining that journey. Further, attempted feminist
engagements have garnered very little attention. Take for example, the article
“Individualism and the Objects of Psychology” that Naomi Scheman published
in 1983.3 In this piece, Scheman offers a sustained and incisive critique of what
she calls “the individualist assumption” in much of mainstream philosophy of
mind and develops a thoroughgoing anti-​individualist account of the mental. In
spite of being published in a widely used feminist anthology, this chapter exerted
little influence either in feminist theory or in traditional analytic philosophy
(Golumbia 1999, 202).
David Golumbia argues that the traditionalism and sexism of much of ana-
lytic philosophy of mind and its technical and scientistic character have alien-
ated and discouraged feminists (Golumbia 1999, 202–​203). While there is truth
in this reasoning, it cannot be the entire truth. After all, areas like philosophy

Keya Maitra, Toward a Feminist Theory of Mental Content In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0004
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 71

of science and epistemology are every bit as technical and scientistic and just as
“heavily guarded fortresses of philosophy,” yet they have cultivated significant
feminist contributions (Golumbia 1999, 203).4 I propose that the lack of feminist
engagement here might be due to the fact that a theory of content’s benefits have
not been clearly articulated. To rectify the situation, we need to address the ques-
tion, “What kind of externalism would work for the feminist project?”
I open my argument by considering the externalist theory of meaning and
mental content. Externalism is the view that factors outside of one’s mind at least
partially determine the content of mental phenomena. Given feminist interest
in understanding the sociopolitical factors underlying systems of oppression,
and the fact that most of these factors exist outside of one’s mind, it would seem
that the externalist approach would be the best option for feminist purposes.
However, not every externalism is compatible with feminism. Indeed, an impor-
tant aspect of my central argument consists in exposing how and why classical
externalist accounts in the philosophy of mind literature remain ineffectual for
feminist purposes. In treating the social world as a transparent given, and not a
malleable product of various interacting power dynamics, the typical externalist
account remains inadequate for capturing how factors outside of us are respon-
sible for the contents of our thoughts and aspirations. This observation opens the
need to outline a few features that a feminist theory of content should have. The
final part of my argument develops the first approximation of a feminist theory of
content. In this regard, I will use Ruth Garrett Millikan’s “consumer” account of
meaning and mental representation as a template. While Millikan’s theory does
not feature directly within the philosophy of mind literature on mental content
per se, given its focus on evolutionary functioning of cognitive systems, its ex-
ternalist elements are unmistakable. In the process, I will highlight this theory’s
potential for feminism and outline how it needs to be amended and adjusted in
order to achieve a feminist theory of content.

Externalism about Mental Content: A Classic Version

Philosophers of mind have used the notion of content as a clear way of distin-
guishing between mental and nonmental phenomena. The blooming Olivia rose
bush in my neighbor’s garden is nonmental, while my thought that it is breath-
taking is mental. This much seems obvious. But the notion of content allows
us to clarify this distinction. The blooming Olivia bush is not about anything
else beyond itself. True, it gives a lot of enjoyment to passersby but in itself it
is simply itself. My thought that the blooming Olivia rose bush is breathtaking,
however, is about something else, namely, the bush. Franz Brentano is credited
with underscoring this distinction between nonmental and mental phenomena
72 Mind and Gender&Race&

and introducing the notion of intentionality to characterize what he took to be

the “mark of the mental.” He observes that things in a mind are about something
else. The question that becomes primary then is how a thought or desire comes
to be about whatever it is. How is such aboutness determined? The debate over
mental content is about what factors determine the contents of mental items.
A good place to start a quick review of the debate over mental content is with
the causal theories of meaning and reference in analytic philosophy of language
that were proposed by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke in 1960s and 1970s.
Countering the description theory of meaning that associates the meaning of
a term with various descriptions, proponents of the causal theory of reference
argue that the object referred to by a term ultimately determines the meaning of
the term. For example, description theory maintains that the meaning of “water”
is determined and learned by its associated description as a thirst-​quenching,
colorless, odorless liquid that fills our lakes, rivers, and oceans, and is good for
bathing. Proponents of causal theories, on the other hand, argue that the meaning
of “water” is determined by the chemical makeup of whatever stuff one interacts
with in using the term “water.” This idea motivates Putnam’s proclamation,
“ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head” (Putnam 1975, 227). The structure of the world
determines meaning, not the description in one’s mind. He contrives his classic
Twin Earth example to drive this point home. In this example, we are asked to
imagine a remote planet in our universe, the Twin Earth, exactly like Earth ex-
cept for a few critical differences. One difference is that instead of water (H2O),
Twin Earth has a different stuff, whose complex chemical compound is abbrevi-
ated as XYZ. We are to imagine further that the macro properties of XYZ, prop-
erties one would encounter under normal Earth temperatures and pressures, are
indistinguishable from the properties of water. One implication of this example
is that the descriptions we use to describe our phenomenological interactions
with either Earth water or Twin Earth water would be indistinguishable.
Still, according to Putnam, anyone using the term “water” on Earth would be
referring to H2O and not XYZ. This is simply because it is H2O that English lan-
guage users interact with when using “water.” Further, let us assume that folks
on Twin Earth, who in the example speak English, also use the term “water” to
refer to the clear liquid that they find in their lakes and reservoirs. But since they
only interact with XYZ in their Twin Earth environment, their term “water”
refers to XYZ and not H2O (Putnam 1975, 223). Thus, in a causal theory of refer-
ence, what determines the meaning of a term is the object in the world to which
the term first refers and this content is then subsequently passed down using a
causal chain. Further, Putnam clarifies, “Every linguistic community exempli-
fies the . . . division of linguistic labor . . . : that is, possesses at least some terms
whose associated ‘criteria’ are known only to a subset of the speakers who ac-
quire the terms, and whose use by the other speakers depends upon a structured
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 73

cooperation between them and the speakers in the relevant subsets” (Putnam
1975, 228). He distinguishes between the criteria of acquiring the use of a term,
for example “gold,” and acquiring the method of recognizing whether something
is gold or not (Putnam 1975, 227). There might be certain situations where only
the experts can recognize that a piece of metal is gold. A common speaker might
not be able to tell whether her term “gold” applies in those situations. But such a
speaker will still know the meaning of the term “gold” given the cooperative fea-
ture of language use.
The discussion about mental content in philosophy of mind in many ways
parallels the discussion on the nature of meaning just outlined. Focusing on
mental “representation”—​understood simply as mental items with semantic
properties—​philosophers of mind discuss which factors determine the contents
of representations: what they are about. The main discussion is framed in terms
of the contrast between externalism and internalism or individualism and anti-​
individualism.5 Internalism or individualism maintains that the content of
a mental state is determined by factors and properties internal to the subject’s
mind. Tyler Burge characterizes individualism as “philosophical treatments
that seek to see a person’s intentional mental phenomena ultimately and purely
in terms of what happens to the person, what occurs within him, . . . without
any essential reference to the social context in which he or the interpreter of his
mental phenomena are situated” (Burge 2007, 132–​133).6 An externalist or anti-​
individualist view, on the other hand, argues that the content of a mental state is
determined at least in part by factors outside the subject’s mind. Using the Twin
Earth example, an internalist would argue that the respective mental state of Sam
on Earth, that is, “Earth Sam,” and his Twin Earth doppelganger, “Twin Earth
Sam,” containing the term “water” are identical given their phenomenological
indistinguishability. An externalist, on the contrary, would argue that they are
not the same since their relevant external environments—​Earth with H2O and
Twin Earth with XYZ—​are different. Putnam’s version of externalism focuses on
natural kind terms, that is, terms referring to kinds we encounter in our phys-
ical environment, like “water” and “gold.” Tyler Burge extends this idea through
his social anti-​individualism that maintains that if our words get deployed in
different social and linguistic environments, then they have different meanings
correspondingly. As his arthritis example shows, Burge also deploys Putnam’s
insights explicitly to the question of ascription of mental content or what he calls
“content attribution” (Burge 2007, 127).
In his famous example involving the term “arthritis,” Burge asks us to imagine
an English-​speaker, let us call her “Jane,” who experiences pain in her thigh and
thinks that she has arthritis in her thigh. Since Jane is not a doctor according to
the example, she is unaware that arthritis is a condition that afflicts joints only,
and therefore she cannot have it in her thigh. So in thinking that she has arthritis
74 Mind and Gender&Race&

in her thigh, she entertains a false thought. Burge then asks us to imagine an-
other situation where our same Jane is part of a linguistic community where the
term “arthritis” is used to refer to a different ailment, say “tharthritis,” which is
not just a condition of the joints but also includes the thighs. Under this imagi-
nary social situation, when Jane thinks that she has arthritis in her thigh, she is
entertaining a true thought. Since by hypothesis Jane is the same person in both
these situations—​her mental states and experience of her physical ailment are
identical, the difference in her respective thought is due to the difference in her
respective linguistic community (Burge 2007, 123–​124). Burge uses this example
to demonstrate that mental content is determined at least in part by communal
linguistic and social contexts. Burge specifies that the role the social environment
plays in content determination is “constitutive” (Burge 2007, 151). He unpacks
the idea of “constitutive” in terms of the mental content of a term depending
on its “underlying network of relations to the environment” (Burge 2007, 154).
As he writes, “the natures and correct individuation of many of an individual
person’s intentional, or representational, mental states and events commonly de-
pend in a constitutive way on relations that the individual bears to a wider social
environment” (Burge 2007, 151).

Ingredients for a Feminist Theory of Content

The constitutive emphasis on communal and social determinants of mental

content should make the externalist theory of mental content tailor-​made
for feminist theorizing. Indeed, feminists seem to share the wide-​ranging
externalist criticism of internalism within mainstream philosophy of lan-
guage and mind for neglecting the world.7 Interestingly, however, feminists
who are critical of individualism and internalism do not take the extra step of
constructing a positive externalist theory. Why not? Most likely they find little
feminist potential in the typical ways anti-​individualist or externalist theo-
ries get worked out in philosophy of language and mind. As Jennifer Saul and
E. Díaz-​León write:

One might well suggest that philosophers of language have generally attended
only to aspects of the social world that are not of particular interest to feminists.
While causal theories of reference undeniably involve social elements, these so-
cial elements don’t seem to be of the sort that concern feminists; while Putnam’s
division of linguistic labour arguably involves some power relations (experts
have a special sort of linguistic power that non-​experts lack), the political
aspects of these power relations—​if any—​have been ignored. (Saul and Díaz-​
León 2018, 18)
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 75

In other words, classic theories of externalism fail to point out how the individ-
ualist accounts of mental content neglect the social (and political) world and the
extent of the damage such a neglect exacts on one’s theory. Further, even though
Burge says relations that an individual bears to a wider social environment are re-
sponsible for determining the contents of that individual’s thoughts and beliefs,
his theoretical framework doesn’t allow any room or need for understanding
those relations in terms of social categories such as gender and race. For these
reasons, feminist perspectives have little to gain from engaging with this version
of externalism given where it stops.
Moreover, externalist theorizing that draws its intuitive force from thought
experiments fails to take certain dimensions of the real world seriously, and un-
derstanding these dimensions is crucial to understanding how social contexts
can impact our thoughts and beliefs. The Twin Earth example is set up in a way
such that everything is hypothetically kept exactly the same except the fact that
“water” on Earth is causally connected to samples of H2O, while on Twin Earth
it is connected to samples of XYZ. Setting up the experiment such that the twins
are in indistinguishable psychological states would have the implication that
their respective behavior and/​or action generating from those states would need
to remain indistinguishable as well. This way of setting up the thought experi-
ment, however, underestimates the relation between content, behavior, context,
and environment. Earth Sam and Twin Earth Sam would both drink the liquid
they find in their kitchen faucet when thirsty. But if we imagine the chemical
compound XYZ to be toxic for inhabitants of Earth, and also that Earth Sam
finds herself in Twin Earth, a possibility that Putnam’s example clearly imagines,
then her beliefs involving “water” and other related mental states would come to
differ significantly from that of Twin Earth Sam. So the hypothetical setup of this
example and its capacity to serve as the main argument in defense of externalism
become far less obvious on closer examination.
Further, the use of the example “water” and its framing in terms of its causal re-
lation to H2O or XYZ seem to overestimate the viability of its application to terms
of social and political import like “gender,” “whiteness,” or “immigrant.”8 These
terms are entangled in an ongoing constitutive fashion with the phenomena
they refer to and not passively “dangling at the other end of a long causal chain”
(Clark and Chalmers 1998, 9). Thus it is no wonder that externalism’s potentials
for social and political philosophy remain underexplored (Haslanger 2012, 395).
Such implications seem hard to articulate when externalism’s central argument is
modeled after the Twin Earth example. As Millikan writes, “Historical entities—​
actual world entities, not possibilities—​are what are at the center of cognitive
life. They are the main structures that make thought and language possible.
‘Meanings’ do not carve up possible worlds. They are structured and maintained
almost entirely by the actual world, their degree of determinateness is contingent
76 Mind and Gender&Race&

on actual historical processes” (Millikan 2017, 21; emphasis added). As a result,

an adequate theory of content would need to be informed by the social and po-
litical concerns that require us to take currently existing, structurally and his-
torically embedded patterns of oppression and marginalization into account.
A theory of content so informed—​a feminist theory of content, given feminist
theorists’ nuanced analyses of these patterns—​would be a welcome engagement
from the perspective of philosophy of mind.
In the conclusion of “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’ ” Putnam writes, “Traditional
philosophy of language, like much traditional philosophy, leaves out other people
and the world; a better philosophy and a better science of language must encom-
pass both” (Putnam 1975, 271). What I noted earlier, however, is that typical ex-
ternalist theories leave both “other people and the world” unproblematized. They
thus fail to recognize the complex patterns of embeddedness that many of our
terms have in social and political structures of power and dominance (Haslanger
2005, 12). This oversight is costly since such a typical externalist account could
still “be taken to legitimate a white male paradigm of meanings: X means Y be-
cause the (white, male) power structure has taken it to mean Y” (Pappas 1999,
218). Referring to the “neoconservative defenders” of culture who appeal to the
need to “preserve past unity” in arguing against any pluralistic explorations into
the nature of meaning and mind, Nickolas Pappas alerts us that “ ‘the social’ can
be as opaque, hence as susceptible to strategic manipulations, as ‘the mental’ ”
(Pappas 1999, 218). This is why Golumbia suggests that feminist theory “offers
a far more unsettling picture, in which not just meanings but minds, in an im-
portant sense, aren’t in the head—​instead, they are part of the general social and
cultural, which is to say political, fabric” (Golumbia 1999, 209).
Scheman offers a clear defense of a minds-​aren’t-​in-​the-​head thesis through
her attack on the individualist assumptions that “psychological objects are par-
ticular states of individuals” and that they “attach to us singly (no matter how
socially we might acquire them)” (Scheman 1983, 227). Even though in these
formulations Scheman’s critique seems directed at the location of a mental state,
they also highlight that psychological objects cannot exist independently of the
ways the world turns out. For her, the ways of the world necessarily include our
experience of inextricable interdependence, that is to say, of being “constitutively
dependent on other things,” events, people, and their voices in one’s social real-
ities (Scheman 1983, 229). She takes this interdependence to be a salient feature
of women’s everyday experience. An anti-​individualist or externalist theory that
takes women’s experiences as real, she argues, has to accept “human beings as so-
cially constituted, as having emotions, beliefs, abilities, and so on only insofar as
they are embedded in a social web of interpretation that serves to give meaning
to the bare data of inner experience and behavior” (Scheman 1983, 232). Further,
she criticizes the “individualism of method, a counting of each as one and only
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 77

one,” that for her is continuous with content individualism and foundational to
liberal political theory (Scheman 1983, 231). Scheman proposes that objects of
psychology do not belong to the “political confines of our own heads and hearts
and guts” (Scheman 1983, 241). Finally, Scheman writes, “we are responsible for
the meaning of each other’s inner lives, that our emotions, beliefs, motives, and
so on are what they are because of how they—​and we—​are related to the objects
in our world—​not only those we share a language with, but those we most in-
timately share our lives with” (Scheman 1983, 241). Earlier I noted Burge’s
characterization of anti-​individualism as the idea that content is constitutively
determined by social environment. However, the “anti-​ individualism” that
Scheman is proposing here is distinctly different. For her individualism denotes
“a respect for separateness” that her anti-​individualism rejects (Scheman 1983,
231). Burge’s anti-​individualism, in using an unproblematized notion of social
environment that conceives of society as a collection of separate individuals,
fails to take into account the interdependence and interrelatedness that Scheman
considers to constitute our social reality.
So the anti-​individualist or externalist theory of content that feminist theo-
rizing requires has to have the feature of inextricable interdependence of our lan-
guages and minds on our social and political world. Only when we acknowledge
this nature, and further how this interdependence is undervalued in the domi-
nant structures of power, do we begin to appreciate another aspect of this theory
of content: in the recognition that our minds are constitutively dependent on our
sociopolitical realities lies the first “important step in the process of changing
them” (Golumbia 1999, 209). This brings us to the most important aspect of a
feminist theory of content, namely, that our theorizing has to enable us to im-
agine a different and more equitable reality. It is important to note that “naming
and defining reality are among the ways in which the dominant group takes and
keeps possession of its world” (Garry and Pearsall 1989, 48). Or, as Scheman
elaborates, “what purports to be a statement about how things naturally are is in-
stead an expression of a historically specific way of structuring some set of social
interactions” that furthers the dominant status quo (Scheman 1983, 230–​231).
Any possibility of subverting this domination has to start with an understanding
of its underlying mechanism.
Putnam-​Burge externalism falls short of this target because it remains con-
fined to a status quo understanding of various linguistic and mental concepts.
But in so doing, it “fails to understand how our current concepts have struc-
tured our practices, distribute power and authority, and bring with them false
assumptions of legitimacy” (Haslanger 2005, 15). A theory of content for fem-
inist purposes would not only tell us how—​through the process located in a
particular sociopolitical history—​these concepts come to have their content,
but also what would be required to transform their content. In the next section,
78 Mind and Gender&Race&

I argue that a feminist theory of content inspired by Millikan’s teleosemantic

theory will be able to do both.

Millikan’s Teleosemantic View

All teleosemantic theories of mental content argue that the content of a

representation—​its aboutness—​depends on the teleological notion of function.
“Function” here is typically understood in terms of its etiology since it is deter-
mined by the history of the item or system possessing it (Millikan 1994, 245).9
For example, the function of a human heart to pump blood is determined by its
being selected for, that is, reproduced or copied for, pumping blood in the evolu-
tionary history of the human biological system. While in this case the heart was
“selected for” given its role in the history of biological evolution, other histories
such as “modern history” where functions are determined by recent selection
and sociocultural histories, among others, can also serve as the location for re-
production and selection (Godfrey-​Smith 1994).
Given this understanding of “function,” the content of a representation
becomes what it is supposed to or designed to represent. A simple teleological
theory thus maintains that a mental representation “R” represents R when the
cognitive system that “R” is a part of “was designed to react to Rs by producing
‘Rs’ ” (Millikan 1994, 243). Evolutionary selectionist history is taken to tell us
the story of why the cognitive system evolved to produce “R” in response to R
in its environment. But what exactly determines that R is the content of “R”?
What mechanism makes my thought this morning, for example, that hemlock
woolly adelgid are back, about the hemlock tree I see outside my window and the
characteristic white markings that I see on its leaves?10 Millikan argues that two
adjustments have to be made to the teleosemantic framework if our account is to
answer this question with sufficient precision.
First, we need to foreground how a cognitive system uses a representation.
This is because simply focusing on the evolutionary (and other, for example, cul-
tural) history which grounds the functioning of a cognitive system as it produces
a representation fails to hit the mark of what that representation is about. As
Millikan proposes, we need to consider the cognitive system

as divided into two parts or two aspects, one of which produces representations
for the other to consume. What we need to look at is the consumer part, at what
it is to use a thing as a representation. Indeed, a good look at the consumer part
of the system ought to be all that is needed to determine not only representa-
tional status but representational content. (Millikan 1994, 246)
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 79

This emphasis on the “consumer part,” on how a representation is used as deter-

mining its content, not only sets Millikan’s “consumer” account apart from other
teleosemantic accounts and the classic externalisms of Burge and Putnam, but,
as I will argue in the final section, also makes it the correct mold for a feminist
theory of content.
In addition to the shift in focus from simple evolutionary history to the con-
sumer function, Millikan’s account also redirects our attention from functions
to “normal conditions for those functions” (Millikan 1994, 249). Normal
conditions are those that allowed the function to be historically performed
when it was performed properly. Again using the example of the human heart,
normal conditions would include being part of a viable biological system where
pumping blood led to the system’s survival, reproductive potential, and selective
advantage. In the case of mental representation, normal conditions are those that
support the correspondence between the representation and the world outside.
My thought that the hemlock woolly adelgid are back on the hemlock outside my
window requires that the hemlock woolly adelgid are indeed back on the hem-
lock outside my window if the representations involved are to participate in the
functioning of my cognitive system. On this theory of content, then, what the
consumers of “R” require is that “R” corresponds to appropriate situations “in
order to perform their [consumers’] tasks” (Millikan 1994, 250). There are many
more nuances to Millikan’s teleosemantic view, but this brief outline should suf-
fice for our purpose of building toward a feminist theory of content.

Toward a Feminist Theory of Content

Before offering ways to modify Millikan’s consumer account to fit the needs of a
feminist theory of content, let me address a few concerns regarding this account’s
compatibility with feminist orientations. First, Millikan is no different from
other externalist philosophers of mind who omit social and political concerns.
Since her primary focus is to develop a realist account of intentionality that
understands language and thought as biological categories with functions, these
concerns are not central to her project. However, I believe nothing precludes a
theoretical framework from being adapted for feminist theorizing. I am inspired
in this regard, for example, by Judith Butler’s adaptation of Merleau-​Ponty’s phe-
nomenological model even though “Merleau-​Ponty does not write his theory
of sexuality within an explicitly political framework” (Butler, this volume, 175).
Thus even though Millikan doesn’t write within an explicitly political framework,
her model can be extended in a way that offers arguments useful for feminist
purposes. Indeed, I will argue that Butler’s theoretical tools allow us to appreciate
80 Mind and Gender&Race&

another interesting feature of Millikan’s theory that makes its adaptation for fem-
inism especially worthwhile.
A more serious unease about the effectiveness of Millikan’s framework for our
purposes might result from its general and evolutionary naturalistic framing.
This concern stems from feminist worries about naturalism and requires a lay-
ered response. Feminist denunciation of certain versions of naturalism, such as
those that obliterate historical situatedness, is absolutely crucial. Such obliter-
ation is evident, for example, in the “naturalist ideology” of mainstream theo-
rizing about sexuality that offers a “normative model [of sexuality] against which
individual instances can be gauged” (Butler, this volume, 175). This naturalism
thus turns prescriptive and ideological, and reflects the social situation of the
theorist more than an objective reality. Instead, as Butler points out, what we
need is an account of sexuality “which restores both the historical and volitional
components of sexual experience and, consequently, opens the way for a fuller
description of sexuality and sexual diversity” (Butler, this volume, 175).
Clarifying the nature of Millikan’s naturalism would allow us to show why it
is not a prescriptive or ideological naturalism. Millikan’s goal is to offer an ac-
count of mental content without already assuming some semantic notion like
meaning or intention. So her point is to offer an account of intentionality in
nonintentional terms, as Chalmers notes while introducing Millikan’s chapter
titled “Biosemantics” in his philosophy of mind anthology (Chalmers 2002, 474).
This approach does not necessitate a specific “naturalist ideology” since the aim
is not to offer a standard that every instance is evaluated against. More impor-
tantly, Millikan’s account, though naturalistic, is not blind to historically situated
information. Indeed, history of use—​how a term has been used by the language
system that has contributed to that system’s survival and flourishing under
selectionist pressures—​is a central determining feature of Millikan’s theory of
content.11
How do I propose to modify Millikan’s teleosemantic account? First, by
highlighting that Millikan is clear from her very first articulation that functions
can also result from the cultural and social context of meme selection (Millikan
1984). As she clarifies more recently, the term “biological” in her Language,
Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984) “was a metaphorical reference
to selectionist principles of every kind. Well known analogs of natural selection
are found, for example . . . in some kinds of cultural selection” (Millikan 2017,
5). Meme is the unit of selection in the context of cultural evolution. Human
preferences, what Elizabeth Anderson calls “contextual interests and values”
over the span of the history of a culture, influence which meme gets reproduced
while serving a specific function (Anderson 1995, 46). Words, for example, are
memes reproduced and selected for their function in the relevant linguistic
cultures.12 Human preferences in the form of dominant preferences within a
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 81

cultural context play a role in determining the contents of our mental items by
shaping the mechanism through which a term gets used to correspond to certain
features of our cultural and social reality. These mechanisms thus can help us
explain how our terms, for example, terms with political import, such as “im-
migrant” and “whiteness,” come to have the contents they do in the context of
contemporary US culture.
Millikan has also argued that what a cognitive system can do “in accordance
with evolutionary design” can be “very novel and surprising” given these sys-
tems’ ability to learn and adapt (Millikan 1994, 251). Thus the “specific principles
of generalization and discrimination, etc., which have been built into the system
by natural selection” can be used for purposes these principles were not designed
for originally (Millikan 1994, 251). They have helped us learn new ideas such as
those of economic recession and the Global Positioning System. In the history of
many societies and cultures, these generalizing and discriminative apparatuses
have also been used to dominate, marginalize, and oppress others. Such dom-
inating functions can become the norm for a certain culture under certain fa-
vorable and historical conditions. This apparatus can explain, for example, how
racism has become the norm for US and global culture by getting “in the struc-
ture of our society and the invisible crannies of our mind” (Brooks 2019).
My proposal is that Millikan’s basic model gives us a way of understanding
the conditions underlying oppressive social structures that enabled the propa-
gation of their historical function of maintaining the status quo of domination.
This way of approaching the discussion reveals the forces that have been oper-
ational in keeping stable certain oppressive structural conditions that deter-
mined the contents of many of our terms. This understanding can then allow us
to imagine a transformative reality; a sociocultural reality where, under chan-
ging conditions and levels of awareness that undermine the stabilizing forces of
the oppressive status quo, our terms can come to have, over time, transformed
egalitarian content. In the following I offer a modified teleosemantic view for
content for the terms “immigrant,” “whiteness,” and “illegal alien,” whose cur-
rent meanings in the US context were forged and reproduced in the sociocultural
and political history that stabilized their function for white supremacy. Using the
teleosemantic model to understand these terms allows us to expose the mech-
anism undergirding that dominant agenda.
In his illuminating article “Illegal: White Supremacy and Immigration Status,”
José Jorge Mendoza looks at the history of US citizenship and immigration law
to expose how the concept of “whiteness” is implicated in the current dominant
discussion of illegal immigration. His analysis shows how “whiteness” in the US
context corresponds to a “braid of three interwoven strands” of race, ethnicity,
and nationality (Mendoza 2016, 201). He also outlines the process through which
the content or meaning of “whiteness” is determined and held stable. He shows
82 Mind and Gender&Race&

how one or more of these strands account for the ways “white” status has been
granted to different social groups at different moments of the US political history
and how this differential status in turn determined that group’s eligibility for US
citizenship. For example, the very first Naturalization Act that the US passed in
1790 stipulated that “only ‘white persons’ would be eligible for naturalization”
(Mendoza 2016, 208). This requirement for “white” status does not end with the
amendments adopted at the end of the Civil War. Mendoza traces how “white”
status continued to be required for US citizenship historically. It is emphasized
through the ethnicity strand, for example, in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
that excluded Chinese nationals from US citizenship. Similarly, the nationalism
strand is at play in the Johnson-​Reed Act of 1924 that “introduced a system of
‘national origin’ quotas” (Mendoza 2016, 211). Interestingly, 1890 census num-
bers were used to determine the quotas for the 1924 Act, even though later census
numbers were available, since it was argued that the 1890 census “captured the
true composition of the United States before it was deformed by a large wave of
Southern and Eastern European immigrants” (Mendoza 2016, 211). With this
brief outline of Mendoza’s main points, let me now turn to how his account helps
us clarify the process that stabilizes the content of “whiteness” in the US political
and social contexts.
Mendoza’s analysis helps us identify the “consumer” and “normal
conditions”—​ two important elements in Millikan’s teleosemantic model—​
that determine the content of “whiteness.” The consumer of this representa-
tion, whose survival and propagation was its function, has been the political
power structure dominant in the United States since the ratification of the US
Constitution. The normal conditions, to remind ourselves, are the conditions
under which the function of a term is performed historically that help specify the
correspondence relation between the term and its referent. In the case of “white-
ness,” the normal conditions are the various US government acts and related
Supreme Court decisions, listed in Mendoza’s article, that allowed its function of
undergirding white privilege to be performed and replicated, and that ensured
that the meaning of “whiteness” corresponds to actual political conditions.
Through this process, “whiteness” comes to correspond to the interwoven reality
of race, ethnicity, and nationality that Mendoza takes to make “American white-
ness” (Mendoza 2016, 208).
Another intriguing feature of Mendoza’s analysis is how the history of words
such as “Caucasian” and “illegal” in common speech gets implicated in how the
Supreme Court makes its decisions (Mendoza 2016, 213). Knowing the history of
these terms and the forces that solidified their meanings—​for example, the 1817
and 1824 Immigration Acts, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1965
Naturalization and Immigration Act, and various related US Supreme Court
decisions—​helps us understand how the contents of these terms are selected,
 A Feminist Theory of Mental Content 83

reproduced, and stabilized. These examples thus offer an illustration of how po-
litical, social, and cultural forces work in the historical timeline to determine the
content of terms we use. The feminist theory of content I am developing here
helps us appreciate the concrete way that power shapes the very structures that
our cognitive systems use to navigate our social and political realities. Exposing
the forces of power that keep conceptual structures stable and resistant to change
also helps us imagine what is required to change them. It therefore demonstrates
the effectiveness of discussion in philosophy of mind for answering questions
more readily located in the areas of social and political philosophy. Ashby
Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie write, “we have the capacity to revise social
meanings and enact different kinds of worlds—​worlds that are more conducive
to individual and social flourishing, rather than harm and oppression” (Butnor
and MacKenzie, this volume, 191). I agree wholeheartedly and believe that by
exploring how terms and concepts have come to have their meanings, including
oppressive ones, we can also start the process of imagining how they can have
content conducive to social flourishing.
Thinking about the question of content, especially in relation to feminist topics
using Millikan’s framework, has one obvious advantage: it allows us to focus on
these concepts/​meanings in terms of their historical selection and reproduction.
Further, understanding them through this framework also helps us uncover the
forces that keep them stable. Putnam-​Burge externalism, in the case of “white-
ness,” focuses on how the term is used in the linguistic community of English
speakers in the United States (more specifically, one might argue, the community
of white, male, bourgeois academics), and thus is unequipped to capture the re-
lational or historical dynamics of factors that play a role in the determination of
content. It is here that Millikan’s teleosemantic theory becomes useful.
Let me conclude by acknowledging that combining feminism and philosophy
of mind, fields that might appear to have incompatible goals, methodologies, and
audiences, requires confrontation on the way to possible resolution. I hope to
have shown that the conflict is productive, that feminists and philosophers of
mind have good reason to take steps toward one another.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Jennifer McWeeny, Paula Droege, Brook Sadler, Arindam Cakrabarti,

and Ruth Millikan for many helpful comments and conversations.
2. My search attempts to find sources involving mental content and feminism returned
no result at the online databases of the Philosopher’s Index and PhilPapers.
3. Golumbia writes, “Indeed, along with Hilary Putnam’s ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’
and Tyler Burge’s ‘Individualism and the Mental,’ I think of Scheman’s essay as one of
84 Mind and Gender&Race&

the most important essays in philosophy of mind to have appeared in recent times”
(Golumbia 1999, 202).
4. See, for example, Alcoff and Potter (1993), Kourany (2010), and Grasswick (2011).
5. While the contrasting positions are most commonly referred to as “externalism” and
“internalism” in the philosophy of mind literature, Burge has been one of the prom-
inent exceptions in preferring the names “individualism” and “anti-​individualism”
instead. Burge outlines his reasons for his preference (Burge 2007, 154). However,
given how widely the name “externalism” is used in the literature, I have decided to
stick with this name while also noting its intimate overlaps with “anti-​individualism.”
6. Burge proposes his anti-​individualist theory in “Individualism and the Mental,” orig-
inally published in 1979. This paper is later reprinted in Burge (2007) along with a
postscript. All page references here are from Burge (2007).
7. See, for example, Saul and Díaz-​León (2018) and Scheman (1983). However, not
every feminist theorist agrees. Antony (1995), for example, offers a defense of indi-
vidualism for the feminist project.
8. However, as Jennifer McWeeny pointed out, “water” can also be a socially and polit-
ically loaded term. Imagine being a resident in one of the slums in Chennai, India,
during its acute water crisis in June 2019 when private water tankers were the only
source of reliable water. One’s ability to buy that water would definitely influence
one’s understanding and use of the term “water.”
9. Millikan’s “Biosemantics” was originally published in 1989.
10. These are tiny aphid-​like insects that attack North Carolina hemlock trees.
11. However, while Butler takes “historical” to mean “individual acts of appropria-
tion” (Butler, this volume, 180) located in individual histories, for Millikan “histor-
ical” stands for “historically optimal conditions” located in the selectionist history
(Millikan 1994, 246).
12. See, for example, Dennett (2017) for a recent account of the role of memes in the de-
velopment of human minds.

References
Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter, Elizabeth, eds. 1993. Feminist Epistemologies. New
York: Routledge.
Anderson, Elizabeth. 1995. “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist
Epistemology.” Philosophical Topics 23 (2): 27–​58.
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(2): 59–​94.
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Dennett, Daniel. C. 2017. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
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(3): 344–​362.
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Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
 4
Disappearing Black People
through Failures of White Empathy
Janine Jones

Empathy is sometimes thought to be, if not a moral panacea for crimes against
humanity, then a moral motivator to work against them. Notwithstanding the
fact that anti-​black racism is a structural problem, it is conceptually and practi-
cally problematic to propose that black people, in the United States, depend on
the morality and affection of white people for social justice, when justice for black
people, in the US context, is rooted in and endures through the legacy of a legal
tradition whereby black enslaved people were subjected to the absolute power of
white masters, and where their relief from cruelty inflicted upon them by white
people depended on the benevolent feeling and affection between master and
slave (Hartman 1997, 132–​133). Moreover, white empathy for black people tends
to fail.1 In this chapter, I argue that the construction of black people’s minds in
Manichaean opposition to that of white people’s is at the root of white failures
of empathy for black people. I propose that rather than seek to empathize with
black people, white people self-​empathize.
My departure from traditional philosophy of mind can be discerned along
two dimensions. First, I introduce an essential consideration into the debates
about other minds; namely, that it is nearly impossible to perceive or to know
some other minds as minds within contexts of oppression. Since the advent
of the modern era, one of the central ways that white patriarchal groups have
wielded colonial-​enslavement-​subjection power is through constructions of
mind inextricably interwoven with constructions of humanity and personhood.
The minds of members of oppressed groups are constructed as a priori know-
able. The result is that such minds become a posteriori unknowable, or nearly
so, to the dominant group who claims to know them. Black people, the subject
of this chapter, fit the description of this general problem. White supremacist
constructions of black people’s minds emerge from historical conditions of black
enslavement and subjection that determined the scope and extent of constructed
black mentality. If a black enslaved person moved—​in thought, in body—​beyond
the movements allowed or directed by white people, she was known, a priori to
possess a criminal mind, with criminal intent (Hartman 1997, 80–​87). If a black

Janine Jones, Disappearing Black People through Failures of White Empathy In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0005
 Disappearing Black People 87

girl or woman was subjected to what we would call rape, she was known, a priori,
in such instance, as possessing mind—​a willfully submissive mind (Hartman
1997, 80–​87). Hence, she could not have been raped.
Second, the model of self-​empathy I propose introduces the reconstruction
of historical selves as essential to empathetic practice. Such construction effects
a departure from models of empathy that rely solely on the self ’s perception,
memory, and imagination, and includes what the self could not have perceived or
remembered in experience. Introducing historical reconstruction of selves into
empathetic practice opens up possibilities for what a person can imagine about
herself—​among other things, that she is not in a socio-​ontological position apt
for imagining black people empathetically.
When exploring conceptions of Western mind-​body dualism, we tend to
focus on the disconnect between mind and body at the expense of considering
intricate connections conceptualized between the two. In medieval and early
modern literary and nonliterary texts, black skin was fixed as permanent and
compared with the “indurate heart of heretics.” Such comparison anchored the
heart as also being fixed as permanent (Loomba 2009, 505). Arguably, aspects
of what was called the heart became theorized as mind. Such a consideration
compels us to reconsider the tradition in Western thought of theorizing the
body as reflecting the nature of mind and/​or character. Thus, even if we speak
of embodied minds, the problem of black minds cannot be divorced from the
problem of black bodies.
Black bodies signal the problematic-​defective nature of black mind. Excess
has been an essential device for conceptualizing black bodies. Excess and/​or
hypercorporeality indicates that a mind has failed to set limits and order on its
body: it is, par excellence, a nonrational mind. Further, the excess black is con-
ceptually correlated with violence. Excess black materiality requires violence in
the form of forced labor for the emergence of discontinuous (countable) black
bodies (Jones 2016, 325). The black body is thought to emerge through work be-
cause work is invested with reason: “Though black bodies cannot access reason,
through work . . . they would be involved in endeavors possessing utility, and
operations of cause and effect” (Jones 2016, 328). The excess body demands that
the mind that enables such excess be scrutinized. Inspection reveals the nature
of black mind as something practically nonexistent, but criminal or submissive
when in existence.
Significantly, the black mind has been theorized as incapable of making gender
distinctions (Curry 2016, 565). Two ideas might emerge from this claim. First, it
might be thought that black minds were incapable of distinguishing gender, tout
court, one of the most basic categories in Western thought. Is this consistent with
the historical evidence provided by the persisting fear of black males raping white
girls and women—​a criminal intent and action, arguably requiring the capacity
88 Mind and Gender&Race&

to distinguish gender? A second idea should be considered—​namely, that black

minds cannot distinguish gender with respect to their own inchoate bodies.
Mental incapacity for distinguishing gender, coupled with inchoate uncatego-
rizable materiality, which cannot be the object of Western gender distinctions,
invites the idea that black bodies can be placed anywhere, and require outside,
rational direction to find places.
Arguably, excess black bodies are thought of as reflecting minds with what
Dan Zahavi has conceptualized as a “minimal” form of self-​consciousness,
which “precedes the mastery of language and the ability to form full-​blown ra-
tional judgements and propositional attitudes . . . [and which] is not something
unique to, or distinctive of, adult human beings, but something all phenome-
nally conscious creatures possess” (Zahavi 2014, 14). Possessing thin conscious-
ness through work would be thought insufficient for endowing black bodies
with full-​fledged minds (Jones 2016, 328). Combining this picture of mind and
body yields black beings who lack rational minds, who can only be invested with
reason through their laboring bodies. As stated above, the mental states of such
beings—​and what needs to be done with them—​is indicated by the excess their
bodies manifest. Such bodies require, indeed, call forth, violence to counter their
excess. Michael Brown’s murder, Eric Garner’s murder, and Taji Rice’s apprehen-
sion (Tamir Rice’s sister was handcuffed at the scene of her brother’s murder, and
thrown in the back of a squad car) have been so explained in terms of excess
(Ritskes 2015).
The nonmind/​body connection described above renders black people fun-
gible. It reduces them to the socio-​ontological condition of interchangeable mul-
tipurpose tools in the service of humanity, without the kind of loss or gain in
value thought to occur within economies of whiteness when the uniqueness of
a genuine individual is acquired, exchanged, mutated, or otherwise destroyed.
My discussion requires an introduction of the concept of white fungibility
(which I attribute to Philip Harper) in contradistinction to black fungibility. It
is primarily due to this Manichaean-​structured opposition that white people’s
ability to successfully perceive or empathize with black people is impeded. My
view understands white and black fungibility as grounded in and derived from
the nature of the kinds of minds constructed through anti-​black, white su-
premacist logics. Black fungibility is derivatively attributed to black bodies, and
implemented directly through them.
In the remainder of this chapter I proceed first by providing a discussion of
black fungibility and its knowable-​unknowable black mind, followed by an eluci-
dation of white fungibility. Subsequently, I offer three (concise) accounts of em-
pathy, each of which presents a particular mode of disappearing black people.
The first—​the Experience/​Analogue-​Construction Model—​underscores white
fungibles’ inability to access or construct experiences that are structurally similar
 Disappearing Black People 89

to that of black fungibles, which is the reason for empathetic failure. The experi-
ence of the black fungible disappears from the field of white people’s experience.
There, on the empathetic horizon, she becomes empathetically imperceptible.
The second—​the Direct Perception Model—​points to how failure of white em-
pathy for black people may begin in perceptual encounters. Recall what Officer
Darren Wilson said regarding his encounter with Michael Brown. When Wilson
grabbed Brown, the only way he could describe the feeling was “I felt like a five-​
year-​old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” (Wilson is 6′4″ and 210 lbs.). Wilson stated
that Brown tried to go for his gun.

Then after he did that he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive
face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon. That’s how angry he
looked . . . it almost looked like he was bulking up to run through the shots,
like it was making him mad that I am shooting at him. And the face he had was
looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in
his way. (Sanburn 2014)

Alleged black bodily excess triggers perception of mindless violence, a threat-

ening representation, which is exchanged (without loss of value) for the black
person. Being able to perceive black people in the world is a reasonable condition
to demand for the possibility of imagining them empathetically. With so many
black people killed because they are exchanged in perception for scary-​monster
threats, the Direct Perception Model seems far from promising, underscoring as
it does how easily black people’s fungible exchange value—​during white percep-
tual experience—​can lead to their deaths. This model illustrates perspicaciously
the problem of the knowable, unknowable black mind. Wilson’s a priori know-
ledge of Brown overdetermines who or what Brown (allegedly) is, thereby deter-
mining that Wilson cannot know who Brown is a posteriori.
The Transference Model of Empathy is closest to that which Saidiya V. Hartman
has in mind. She makes her case for the disappearance of black people through
white acts of empathy using the case of John Rankin (1793–​1886), an American
Presbyterian minister, educator, and abolitionist—​who worked actively on the
Underground Railroad. Rankin unquestionably possesses the bona fides of
a goodwill white person.2 Rankin wrote a letter to his slave-​owning brother in
order to persuade him of the evils of slavery. His epistle engages an empathetic
exercise, during which he substitutes himself and his family, as victims on the
coffle, for black people experiencing the coffle. He writes about how he feels
about his own pain.

I began in reality to feel for myself, my wife, and my children—​the thoughts

of being whipped at the pleasure of a morose and capricious master, aroused
90 Mind and Gender&Race&

the strongest feelings of resentment; but when I fancied the cruel lash was
approaching my wife and children, and my imagination depicted in lively
colors, their tears, their shrieks, and bloody stripes, every indignant principle of
my bloody nature was excited to the highest degree. (Hartman 1997, 18)

This example illustrates how easily black people can be exchanged for something
else, without seeming loss of value in the eyes of the white empathizer. Rankin
did not deem his empathetic exercise a failure simply because he replaced his
empathetic objects with himself. This model may illustrate the problem of the
knowable, unknowable black mind. Supposing Rankin thinks he knows black
people’s pain, and he knows his own, he might as well substitute himself for
them, without loss of value. At the same time, there is the sense that it is because
Rankin does not know black people that he must substitute himself for them,
so as to discover pain that he can deeply understand—​his own and that of other
white people.
The three models I present do not exhaust models of empathy. However, they
cover three important conditions which, in fact, work together in any act of suc-
cessful empathetic engagement. Being able to understand the object of empathy
assumes that the empathizer has succeeded in perceiving the right object and
placing it within the empathetic act. Being able to perceive the object of empathy
is a condition underscoring the importance of the problem of misrecognition
and misnaming (and hence, misunderstanding) in empathy. Finally, empathetic
acts, if they are to be about a particular object, must, as for other imaginative
acts, retain the object of the imagining. Otherwise, the imaginative or empathetic
act fails.
In the last section, I propose that white people self-​empathize. I sketch a two-​
stage model, which relies upon the reconstruction of historical selves. A word of
caution: I do not move beyond the black-​white binary paradigm, countenanced
in much of the literature. The thinking behind such a move is misguided, in
many ways.3 That said, let’s be clear: this chapter does not address all forms of
oppression. It does not address foundational forms of oppression, such as indig-
enous land dispossession and loss of sovereignty, let alone their spatialized con-
vergence with abject black racialization. This chapter concerns a certain Western
understanding of the construction, existence, and value of mind through ab-
ject racialization. Arguably, blackness is at rock bottom in terms of abject
racialization, in the US context. Thus, my work, here, falls within the contours
of a black/​white Manichaeanism that “shapes [Western] aesthetic and moral
valuations” while also infiltrating non-​Western aesthetic and axiomatic systems
through processes of Western colonization (Deliovsky and Kitossa 2013, 165).
Reflecting “a process of negative and positive racialization,” this Manichaeastic
structure “is a symbolic matrix (of inclusion and exclusion) that incorporates
 Disappearing Black People 91

other racial/​ethnic (and class) categories, albeit in a manner both contingent and
hierarchical” (Deliovsky and Kitossa 2013, 165).
I focus entirely on modes of disappearing black people through white em-
pathy. In keeping with this, I attend only to the Manichaean black fungibility/​
white fungibility structure it engenders.

Black Fungibility and White Fungibility

in Manichaean Opposition

Hortense Spillers’s and Hartman’s works provide the foundations for theorizing
black fungibility. The central idea they advance is that no restriction is placed on
what a fungible black body can be exchanged for. It can be exchanged for a com-
modity, for an idea, or even for space, as Tiffany Lethabo King argues in “The
Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)” (2016). According to
Hartman, it is black fungibility’s “abstractedness and immateriality” that makes
it possible for black people to serve as vehicles for “white self-​exploration, re-
nunciation, and enjoyment” (Hartman 1997, 26). She states further that “The
fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty
vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values”
(Hartman 1997, 21). Spillers’s scholarship addresses “Black bodies as open spaces
of shifting ‘signification and representation’ which humans use to make meaning
of their lives” (Spillers, 1987, 75, cited in King 2016, 1025).
Thus, the core features of black fungibility are (1) its abstractedness and imma-
teriality, (2) the commodity-​like/​empty vessel status of black bodies, and (3) the
exchangeability of the black body for anything white people can imagine. Now
suppose it is thought that rational minds direct their well-​formed bodies to en-
gage in rational, human endeavors (see above). Suppose that an inchoate, black
body is thought not to possess a mind—​and when it does, it is thought to possess
not a rational but a criminal or submissive one. Such a body could not be ration-
ally directed by its own mind. For all rational and virtuous intents and purposes,
it wouldn’t have one. I propose therefore that the empty vessel status of the excess
black body is best understood as deriving from its empty-​mind status. Similarly,
the abstractedness and immateriality of the black body’s fungibility is best under-
stood as derivative, where, in the first instance these qualities attach to the absent
mind. Observe: when the criminal mind of the black person is recognized when
the black person moves outside of a white person’s will and direction, such crim-
inal movement undermines the white person’s ability to make the black person’s
body captive for fungible endeavors. One significant repercussion then is that
when black people possess mind during alleged criminal moments, they under-
mine white people’s ability to use them fungibly. The concept of excess plays a
92 Mind and Gender&Race&

role here as well. Black bodies perceived as black excess indicate that there is no
end not only to the various uses that can be made of a black body, but there is no
end to the amount, degree, and quantity of black-​body-​use that can be enjoyed
by white people. The black criminal mind that directs itself limits (or seeks to
limit) what can be done to her body in her moment of criminality. Effecting a
limit undermines the perception that there is no end to what can be done with
her alleged excess. I conjecture that when black bodies are punished, they are
punished not merely for their “crime” but for undermining the perception that
they are infinitely fungible and bringing to light that they have ideas of their own
about their selves.
My general claim is that the ground for the perception of black bodies as
fungible empty vessels, exchangeable for anything, is the construction of black
people as lacking the kind of minds that invest bodies with their own rational
will and intention. Such perception leaves black bodies open and empty for occu-
pation and direction from rational white male minds, and their close associates.
A goodwill white person today would not assert that black people are not ra-
tional or claim that black people possess mind only when criminal or when will-
fully submissive. But possessing rationality can be thought of in terms of degrees.
Thus, a contemporary goodwill white person does not have to be committed to
the idea that black people possess no rationality whatsoever. Further, they never
have to make such statements. Consider what Paul Bloom says about Martin
Luther King in his book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
(2016). He distinguishes between “moral heroes” and “rational maximizers”—​
“people of the heart” as opposed to “people of the head.” “From Huckleberry
Finn to Pip to Jack Auer, from Jesus to Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., they are
individuals of great feeling (of the heart). Rationality gets you Hannibal Lecter
and Lex Luther” (Bloom 2016, 6).
We need not deny that Martin Luther King was a man of great feeling in order
to understand that he was a great strategist, which I would suppose requires ra-
tionality. Knowing a bit of history should make it difficult to place MLK squarely
on the heart side of Bloom’s binary. Bloom appears to have done so with rel-
ative ease. I have no reason to assume that his intentions were not among the
best when he did so. Similar modes of thinking are in play when goodwill
white people use black people to gather experiential data for their theoretical
projects, for which they believe themselves uniquely qualified to be the framers
and interpreters. These are everyday behaviors of goodwill white people in the
academy and elsewhere. Such behaviors place black people on the side of body,
and away from the side of mind and rationality. When goodwill white people
place the responsibility for constructions of defective black cognition on egre-
gious anti-​black individuals and organizations (for example, David Duke or the
KKK), they resort to tactics of obfuscation or, bad faith at worst, or they need to
 Disappearing Black People 93

engage self-​empathetic acts in order to discover that their other is not an other
from another mother (or father).
Let’s now contrast black fungibility with white fungibility. I believe that
Phillip Harper, in Abstractionist Aesthetic, conceptualizes white fungibility
and contrasts it with black fungibility. I will not, however, saddle him with this
claim, as he does not use the term fungibility and the claim may be controversial.
Importantly, white fungibility does not include that constitutive concept of com-
modity necessary to the concept of black fungibility, because the black body has
functioned as a marketable product produced to satisfy white people’s needs and
desires. Central to all forms of fungibility is the concept of exchangeability, and
the concept of abstraction, which allows for it. Mind (or lack of mind) is the key
component effecting the abstraction required for both white and black fungi-
bility. Harper correctly observes that

abstraction is neither good nor bad per se, its value instead depending on the
functions it is made to serve and the perspective from which it is assessed. Indeed,
at the very moment that plantation slavery was being consolidated as the foun-
dation of the U.S.-​national economy (and leaving aside that from this angle
black people’s abstraction constituted an absolute boon), abstraction provided
the conceptual means whereby certain members of the population saw their
own personhood optimized rather than negated, with all the benefits that
implies. (Harper 2015, 31; emphasis added)

Harper argues that white men have been constructed as generic exemplars of ra-
tionality. Because white men are thought of as individuals who represent ration-
ality, and thereby represent humanity, each can replace the other in representing
rational, human projects. To support his claim, Harper offers the example of
Benjamin Franklin, who in 1773 devised a repeatable thirteen-​week course for
“ ‘acquir[ing] the Habitude’ of the thirteen specific ‘virtues’ of which he under-
stood” moral perfection to consist (Harper 2015, 32). Franklin allotted a page for
each virtue. He drew a grid on each page where days of the week were represented
by columns, with each column marked with a letter for the day. Thirteen red lines
crossed these columns, forming rows, which represented virtues. The beginning
of each row was marked with the first letter of a name of a virtue. For example,
the row representing Order was marked with an “O” (Harper 2015, 32).
Harper writes that Franklin gave us “a distinct form for the ideal ‘clean book’
he theoretically might have achieved” (Harper 2015, 33).

Recruited to the project of figuring the moral perfection of the proto-​

republican citizen, its consummate blend of faultless uniformity and or-
dered regularity aptly emblematizes not only the noble genericism but also
94 Mind and Gender&Race&

the supreme rationality that citizen was understood to epitomize. By the

same token, of course, it also figures the absolute exclusion of black (and other
non-​white-​male persons) from the polity, inasmuch as they were considered
incapable of either sublimating their particular interests or eradicating their
vicious tendencies (both of which were held to be intractable elements of
their blackness itself), and deemed wholly devoid of the capacity for reason.
(Harper 2015, 34)

Here, Harper is describing a primary and the restricted manner in which white
men are fungible (that is, interchangeable). White men’s fungibility is inextri-
cably linked to their individuality, which they possess through the kind of minds
they possess—​rational ones. Conversely, the kind of minds white men pos-
sess entail that they are individuals. Thus, the individuality of white men is not
undermined by the genericity that enables their fungibility. As individuals they
are still, to use Tom Regan’s phrase, “subjects of a life” (Regan 2004). Moreover,
their noble fungibility, with respect to humanity, is what accounts for the uni-
versal aspect of their existences. Such representative capacity entails that white
men, in general, are fungible with respect to being interchangeable representa-
tives of rationality and humanity.4
We are now at a point where we can understand why John Rankin (see above)
might have failed had he used two of the models of empathy under considera-
tion, and why he did fail when he tried to use the third.5

The Experience/​Analogue-​Construction Model

for Empathetic Understanding

Allison Barnes and Paul Thagard understand empathy as a system of mapping

the structure of an empathizer’s experience onto the structure of the experi-
ence of the individual with whom the empathizer seeks to empathize—​“the
target.” Such a mapping allows an empathizer to infer, predict, or explain
the target’s emotions based on the goals the empathizer has attributed to the
target, given the situation the empathizer has described the target as being
in. This model of empathy has nothing to do with having or seeking com-
passion or sympathy for a target. It leaves open the possibility that we might
engage in empathetic exercises in order to understand how best to harm a
target. Barnes and Thagard’s model makes explicit how failures can occur.
Empathetic understanding fails to the extent that the empathizer cannot re-
trieve or construct a source analogue corresponding to the structure of the
target’s situation. Thus, an empathetic response will be weak to the extent that
the source analogue of the empathizer
 Disappearing Black People 95

(a) has disparate situations, goals, and emotions from those in the target
analog;
(b) has a causal relation with structure different from that of the target analog;
(c) does not contribute to the cognitive purposes of the empathizer, which
may include problem solving, explanation, or communication. (Barnes
and Thagard 1997)

Rankin would have failed had he used this model. He shares neither
experiences nor structures of experience with black people. Further, had Rankin
constructed an analogue, it would have failed with respect to (a) and (b), and
perhaps with respect to (c). Here I have space only to raise a crucial question
regarding (c). Does empathizing with black people’s pain contribute to Rankin’s
cognitive purposes? What are his cognitive purposes as a fungible white man?
We might also ask: Had Rankin tried to construct an analogue, could he have
known, without understanding his white fungibility, that his analogue was a
failure? Not being able to recognize such empathetic failure is a serious problem
for white empathizers.

The Direct Perception Model

Zahavi understands empathy as fundamental to any kind of access to other

people. He restricts it to basic understanding of another person—​the target—​
who, as in perception, must be present in order for the success of the empathetic
act. Zahavi aims to conceive of empathy in analogy to perception. However, his
model must then recognize empathy as a special form of perception because of
a critical difference between mental states and external objects: mental states,
unlike external objects, have aspects accessible only to the person that has them.
Monika Dullstein observes in “Direct Perception and Simulation: Stein’s Account
of Empathy” that in order to deal with this problem, Zahavi makes the weaker
claim that we experience rather than perceive others’ mental states (Dullstein
2013).6 It would seem then that just as we would fail to perceive a person P if the
person were unavailable for our perception, on Zahavi’s view of empathy, em-
pathy would be unsuccessful if the target is unavailable for the empathetic expe-
rience. In other words, no experience of the target, no experience of the target’s
mental states.
In order to think about whether Rankin would have failed had he used this
model of empathy, we must consider whether he really experienced black people
and their pain in perceptual experience. Although Rankin’s statements suggest
that he knows that black people are in a mental state of suffering, I would like
to cast doubt (not conclusive, by any means) on the idea that he knows or even
96 Mind and Gender&Race&

believes any such thing about them. We cannot understand the situation of the
coffle, black pain, and black enslavement without considering the fundamental
historical conditions in which black pain was perceived by white people, and
black enslavement implemented by white people.
Hartman provides an in-​depth, detailed analysis of the problematics around
black pain for white people, in light of, among other things, their enjoyment
of black pain. Here I mention one problem only, which Hartman calls “the
disavowing of claims of pain.” Black people were forced to dance and sing as
they marched along in chains. The threat of the whip made sure they “stepped
it up lively.” Given such theatrics (and the spectacle and the enjoyment of the
spectacle thereby produced, along with the perceived mindless/​excess nature of
black people), it was difficult for white people to perceive black people’s pain.
The legacy of misperception has continued. White perception of black pain has
been evidenced throughout American medical history. Black enslaved women
suffered gynecological surgeries without the benefit of anesthesia.7 Recent
studies link disparities in pain management to racial bias (Samarrai 2016).
Hartman quotes Abraham Lincoln, who having encountered a coffle delivered
some pithy statements about black pain:

And yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think of them,
they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One
whose offence for which he had been sold was an over-​fondness for his wife,
played the fiddle almost continually; and others danced, sung, cracked jokes,
and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that “God
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” or in other words, that He renders the
worst of the human condition tolerable, while He permits the best, to be
nothing but tolerable. (Hartman 1997, 34)

What Lincoln seems to be telling us is that the pain a black person feels on the
coffle is about as tolerable (or intolerable) as the pain of those living the best of
the human condition—​that is, white people, in particular, white men. Above,
we stated: no experience of target, no experience of target’s mental states.
Considering the case of Rankin, I propose another condition (to that of Zahavi)
for success on this model. If the mental state the empathizer is trying to imagine
is identical with the mental state M through which she seeks to empathize with
the target, but the empathizer cannot experience apperceptively (in experience)
the target’s mental state M, then the empathizer cannot empathetically imagine
the target’s mental state M. The historical conditions surrounding the coffle and
its intended effects on white people, as evidenced by Lincoln’s words, in addition
to the substitution Rankin found it necessary to make, should give us pause re-
garding his ability to experience apperceptively their pain. Therefore, we should
 Disappearing Black People 97

be skeptical of Rankin’s success—​had he tried—​in empathetically imagining

black people’s pain on this model.

The Transference Model of Empathy

De Vignemont and Jacob’s simulation-​based model of empathy, which is re-

stricted to affective states only, offers five conditions for empathy. First, we sup-
pose that an empathizer E* is in some affective state A*. Second, we assume that
E*’s affective state A* stands in some similarity relation to the affective state
A that a target T would be in. E*s being in state A* is caused by T’s being in state
A. E*’s being in A* makes E* aware that her being in A* is caused by T’s being
in A. Thus, E* must care about T’s affective life. Representing another’s pain is
carried out by running offline one’s own pain systems, where an affective pain
system will be activated, but not the sensory-​motor system that typically accom-
panies standard pain. This model understands empathy as a way of gaining a
deeper understanding of the target’s experiences in the situation in which she
finds herself, rather than a means by which the empathizer becomes aware of the
target’s mental state in the first place. Empathy fails if the empathizer is not imag-
ining the other’s pain, but her own (Dullstein 2013, 335–​337).
Of the three models, this one best describes the one Rankin attempted to de-
ploy. Again, we might ask why Rankin substituted himself for black people, as if
by doing so he could get a deeper understanding of their suffering? Rankin wrote,
“We are naturally too callous to the sufferings of others, and consequently prone
to look upon them with cold indifference, until, in imagination we identify our-
selves with the sufferers, and make their sufferings our own” (quoted in Hartman
1997, 18). These thoughts suggest that Rankin is already aware of the mental
states of black enslaved people with whom he seeks to empathize, in which case
he was seeking deeper understanding. But by Rankin’s own account, he felt his
own pain. Hence, according to the model, as understood by its authors, he failed
in imagining black people’s pain. He succeeded only in imagining his own.

Self-​Empathy

Disappearing black people in perception or in the imagination constitutes a

harm, whether intended or not. Such imaginative acts reproduce, in imagination,
the logic of black fungibility—​that is, the exchange of black people for whatever a
white person manages to exchange a black person for, without loss of value. Such
acts exercise habits of mind that are anti-​black. I think it’s fair to suppose that
goodwill whites do not want to practice, even imaginatively, disappearing black
98 Mind and Gender&Race&

people or honing their anti-​black mental capacities. I propose that they try self-​
empathy, which may allow them, first, to understand the forms of racism they
participate in, and second, to see why, for the most part, they cannot empathize
with black people.
Philosophers have found much to reject in Theodor Lipps’s understanding
of empathy, in particular, his imitation view of empathy (Moran 2004, 282).
However, Lipps’s view that self-​understanding involves empathy is, I believe,
to be retained and developed. The self of past and future and imagined states
might be recognized as one’s self, by the self. Following Lipps, self-​objectivation,
which occurs when imagining one’s self, renders the imagined self an other.
But the otherness in question may be understood, with respect to our problem,
as also deriving from the lack of acknowledging one’s self as one’s self, and not
simply from the logic of self-​objectivation. I propose a two-​stage process of self-​
empathy. In the first stage the self becomes aware of an other self. In the second
stage, the self comes to understand herself—​who she is—​through historical re-
construction, and is thereby able to see the alleged other as her own self.
I have in mind, here, subjects who encounter a self they reject as being their
own. Empathetic understanding would be engaged in order to understand,
through first-​person perception of shared mental states, that the other self
is identical with one’s own. To begin, the target self is perceived as an other via
mental states one does not perceive as being one’s own, but of which one has
become aware because one has given voice to ideas that express those mental
states (or perhaps through an implicit bias test). (We might think of this as an
epistemic other.) We can imagine a person in such a situation saying, “Who
said that?” Or even, “What (or who) possessed me to say that?” The American
civil rights activist, journalist, and educator Ann Braden recounts, in Southern
Patriot how, when having breakfast downtown before making her way to the
newspapers to work on the first edition of the afternoon paper, a friend who
had joined her asked, “Anything doing?” Ann Braden replied, “no, just a colored
murder” (Branden 2006, 3). The meaning—​that black lives don’t matter—​the cal-
lousness of expressing the words in front of the black waitress serving them, may
have struck Braden as not coming from her self, although the words had come
from her.
In the first stage, the empathizer seeks to build an analogue of the other
encountered. In the example at hand, our Braden character encountered the
other in first-​person perceptual experience, and might begin to construct an an-
alogue with the words used, the meaning(s) they expressed, the easy callousness
with which they were spoken, and whatever else she might divine from memo-
ries about this other.
The goal of second stage is for the empathizer to recognize that the alleged
other is her self. Hence, the empathizer engages in a reconstruction of her good
 Disappearing Black People 99

self, whereby she comes to understand, through historical reconstruction of her

good white self, the way(s) and the degree to which she is a white fungible. She
will be able to do this, in part, by becoming aware of the historical conditions,
structures, and systems required for the full enjoyment of her white fungibility.
Not to be left to rely on her own selective memory and choices, the empathizer,
in most cases, may require the intervention of historical documents and ana-
lyses, which can provide plausible elucidations of both explicit and implicit
components present in the construction of her self. Broadening our ideas about
what legacies are, how they are transmitted, and what role they may play in the
construction of selves, we may then ask, for example: How might the construc-
tion of white women’s selves be related to structures, systems, and practices, in-
cluding white slave-​owning women’s participation in the marketplace of black
enslavement and in the mistress-​making of their own daughters, especially
within a context in which “historians have neglected these women because
their behaviors toward, and relationships with, their slaves do not conform to
prevailing ideas about white women and slave mastery”? (Jones-​Rogers 2019,
xi–​xii.) The process of discovering and understanding the self I’m theorizing is
antipodal to that of first-​person introspection for discovering the self, and what
the self is. One important condition the white empathizer must examine is black
fungibility, and her relation to it.
Understanding her enjoyment of black fungibility as a white fungible creates
an opening for the empathizer to see how it is possible for the alleged other’s
words to express her meanings and her emotions, and vice versa (Ann Braden’s
alleged other is unmistakably a white fungible.) In this way, the empathizer
comes to deeply understand her good white self. From this point, it is up to the
good white self to overcome its fragility, use its reason and concede that the
best explanation for the situation at hand is that the words in question and their
meanings came from someone who is none other than and deeply her self.
Understanding the nature of white fungibility in relation to black fungibility,
recognizing her other as a white fungible, and then through historical recon-
struction of her self, coming to understand that she (too) is a white fungible, the
empathizer may come to see that the callous white fungible and she possess the
same mental states—​they think the same way, say the same things, and mean the
same things!—​and they do so within the same first-​person mental space. Hence,
the empathizer no longer denies herself. But the good white self could fail at this
juncture. Being more committed to understanding her self as good (or perhaps
unwilling to give up the pleasures of black fungibility), she could fail to see the
evidence, or to use it. In such case, she continues to deny, in the empathetic act,
that her self is herself.
Our Ann Braden character did not fail. Because she desired to truly be good
and not just think herself good, she, like the real Ann Braden, changed her good,
100 Mind and Gender&Race&

white fungible self, not by empathizing with black people, but through self-​
empathy, which was key to her future, active commitment to challenging struc-
tural anti-​black racism.

Notes

1. Plausibly, my general claim about white empathy holds across geopolitical space.
Cashing it out in other contexts requires engaging the historical specifics pertaining to
the construction of black and white people in those contexts.
2. The name “goodwill whites” for good-​willed white people is theorized in Jones (2004).
3. See Deliovsky and Kitossa (2013, 159–​160).
4. Arguably, in the US context, white women also generically stand in as representatives
of humanity. When black men were lynched for allegedly raping white women, the
criminal acts they purportedly committed were crimes against symbols of humanity. If
one imagines that this claim pertains to white, bourgeois women only, reconsider the
case of the Scottsboro Nine. See Jones (2014).
5. Assuming that black people possess minds and rationality, my view leaves us with the
unsettling plausible conclusion that black people, who do see themselves as human
beings—​but also understand white people through white fungibility—​will be able to
empathize with white people, to the extent to which they do not understand them-
selves as black fungibles.
6. See Zahavi (2010, 295) and Dullstein (2013, 341).
7. See Washington (2008).

References
Barnes, Allison, and Paul Thagard. 1997. “Empathy and Analogy.” http://​cog​sci.uwater​
loo.ca/​Artic​les/​Pages/​Empa​thy.html.
Bloom, Paul. 2016. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York:
HarpersCollins.
Braden, Anne. 2006. “Southern Patriot.” http://​www.newsr​eel.org/​tran​scri​pts/​Anne-​Bra​
den-​South​ern-​Patr​iot-​tra​nscr​ipt.pdf.
Curry, Tommy J. 2016. “Ethnological Theories of Race/​Sex in Nineteenth-​Century Black
Thought: Implications for the Race/​Gender Debate of the Twenty-​First Century.”
In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 565–​575.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deliovsky, Katerina, and Tamari Kitossa. 2013. “Beyond Black and White: When Going
Beyond Make Take Us Out of Bounds.” Journal of Black Studies 44 (2): 158–​181.
Dullstein, Monika. 2013. “Direct Perception and Simulation: Stein’s Account of Empathy.”
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Harper, Phillip Brian. 2015. Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in
African American Culture. New York: New York University Press.
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Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in

Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jones, Janine. 2004. “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African
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Whiteness Question, edited by George Yancy, 65–​86. New York: Routledge.
Jones, Janine. 2014. “Caster Semenya: Reasoning Up Front with Race.” In Why Race and
Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, edited by Namita Goswami, Maeve M.
O’Donovan, and Lisa Yount, 133–​155. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Jones, Janine. 2016. “To Be Black, Excess, and Non-​recyclable.” In The Oxford Handbook of
Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack, 319–​330. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jones-​Rogers, Stephanie E. 2019. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners
in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2016. “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes
Fungible(ly).” Antipode 48 (4): 1022–​1039.
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History 40 (3): 501–​522.
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Zahavi, Dan. 2014. Self & Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
 PART II
SE L F A N D SE LV E S
 5
Playfulness, “World”-​Traveling, and
Loving Perception
María Lugones

This chapter weaves two aspects of life together. My coming to consciousness as

a daughter and my coming to consciousness as a woman of color have made this
weaving possible.1 This weaving reveals the possibility and complexity of a plu-
ralistic feminism, a feminism that affirms the plurality in each of us and among
us as richness and as central to feminist ontology and epistemology.
The chapter describes the experience of “outsiders” to the mainstream of,
for example, white/​Anglo organization of life in the United States and stresses
a particular feature of the outsider’s existence: the outsider has necessarily ac-
quired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life where she
is constructed as an outsider to other constructions of life where she is more or
less “at home.” This flexibility is necessary for the outsider. It is required by the
logic of oppression. But it can also be exercised resistantly by the outsider or by
those who are at ease in the mainstream. I recommend this resistant exercise that
I call “ ‘world’-​traveling” and I also recommend that the exercise be animated by
an attitude that I describe as playful.
As outsiders to the mainstream, women of color in the United States practice
“world”-​traveling, mostly out of necessity. I affirm this practice as a skillful, cre-
ative, rich, enriching, and, given certain circumstances, loving way of being and
living. I recognize that much of our travel is done unwillingly to hostile white/​
Anglo “worlds.” The hostility of these “worlds” and the compulsory nature of
the “traveling” have obscured for us the enormous value of this aspect of our
living and its connection to loving. Racism has a vested interest in obscuring
and devaluing the complex skills involved in it. I recommend that we affirm this
traveling across “worlds” as partly constitutive of cross-​cultural and cross-​racial
loving. Thus, I recommend to women of color in the United States that we learn
to love each other by learning to travel to each other’s “worlds.” In making this
recommendation, I have in mind giving a new meaning to coalition and propose
“Women of Color” as a term for a coalition of deep understanding fashioned
through “world”-​traveling.

María Lugones, Playfulness, “World”-​Traveling, and Loving Perception In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0006
106 Self and Selves

According to Marilyn Frye, to perceive arrogantly is to perceive that others are

for oneself and to proceed to arrogate their substance to oneself (Frye 1983, 66).
Here, I make a connection between “arrogant perception” and the failure to iden-
tify with persons that one views arrogantly or has come to see as the products
of arrogant perception. A further connection is made between this failure of
identification and a failure of love, and thus between loving and identifying with
another person. The sense of love is not the one Frye has identified as both con-
sistent with arrogant perception and as promoting unconditional servitude. “We
can be taken in by this equation of servitude with love,” Frye says, “because we
make two mistakes at once: we think of both servitude and love that they are
selfless or unselfish” (Frye 1983, 73). The identification of which I speak is consti-
tuted by what I come to characterize as playful “ ‘world’-​traveling.” To the extent
that we learn to perceive others arrogantly or come to see them only as products
of arrogant perception and continue to perceive them that way, we fail to identify
with them—​fail to love them—​in this particular way.

Identification and Love

As a child, I was taught to perceive arrogantly. I have also been the object of ar-
rogant perception. Though I am not a white/​Anglo woman, it is clear to me that
I can understand both my childhood training as an arrogant perceiver and my
having been the object of arrogant perception without any reference to white/​
Anglo men. This gives some indication that the concept of arrogant perception
can be used cross-​culturally and that white/​Anglo men are not the only arrogant
perceivers.
I was brought up in Argentina watching men and women of moderate and
of considerable means graft the substance of their servants to themselves. I also
learned to graft my mother’s substance to my own. It was clear to me that both
men and women were the victims of arrogant perception and that arrogant per-
ception was systematically organized to break the spirit of all women and of most
men. I valued my rural gaucho ancestry because its ethos has always been one of
independence, courage, and self-​reliance in the midst of poverty and enormous
loneliness. I found inspiration in this ethos and committed myself never to be
broken by arrogant perception. I can say all of this in this way only because of
what I have learned from Frye’s “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love”
(1983). She has given me a way of understanding and articulating something im-
portant in my own life.
Frye is not particularly concerned with women as arrogant perceivers but as
the objects of arrogant perception. Her concern is, in part, to enhance our under-
standing of women “untouched by phallocratic machinations,” by understanding
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 107

the harm done to women through such machinations (Frye 1983, 53). In this
case, she proposes that we could understand women untouched by arrogant per-
ception through an understanding of what arrogant perception does to women.
Frye also proposes an understanding of what it is to love women that is inspired
by a vision of women unharmed by arrogant perception. To love women is, at
least in part, to perceive them with loving eyes. “The loving eye is a contrary of
the arrogant eye” (Frye 1983, 75).
I am concerned with women as arrogant perceivers because I want to ex-
plore further what it is to love women. I want to begin by exploring two failures
of love: my failure to love my mother and white/​Anglo women’s failure to love
women across racial and cultural boundaries in the United States. As a conse-
quence of exploring these failures I will offer a loving solution to them. My solu-
tion modifies Frye’s account of loving perception by adding what I call “playful
‘world’-​travel.” Then I want to take up the practice as a horizontal practice of
resistance to two related injunctions: the injunction for the oppressed to have our
gazes fixed on the oppressor and the concomitant injunction not to look to and
connect with each other in resistance to those injunctions through traveling to
each other’s “worlds” of sense. Thus, the first move is one that explores top-​down
failures of love and their logic; the second move explores horizontal failures.
It is clear to me, that at least in the United States and Argentina, women are
taught to perceive many other women arrogantly. Being taught to perceive arro-
gantly is part of being taught to be a woman of a certain class in both the United
States and Argentina; it is part of being taught to be a white/​Anglo woman in
the United States; and it is part of being taught to be a woman in both places: to
be both the agent and the object of arrogant perception. My love for my mother
seemed to me thoroughly imperfect as I was growing up because I was unwilling
to become what I had been taught to see my mother as being. I thought that to
love her was consistent with my abusing her: using, taking her for granted, and
demanding her services in a far-​reaching way that, since four other people en-
gaged in the same grafting of her substance onto themselves, left her little of her-
self to herself. I also thought that loving her was to be in part constituted by my
identifying with her, my seeing myself in her. Thus, to love her was supposed to
be of a piece with both my abusing her and with my being open to being abused.
It is clear to me that I was not supposed to love servants: I could abuse them
without identifying with them, without seeing myself in them.
When I came to the United States I learned that part of racism is the internal-
ization of the propriety of abuse without identification. I learned that I could be
seen as a being to be used by white/​Anglo men and women without the possi-
bility of identification (that is, without their act of attempting to graft my sub-
stance onto theirs rubbing off on them at all). They could remain untouched,
without any sense of loss.
108 Self and Selves

So, women who are perceived arrogantly can, in turn, perceive other women
arrogantly. To what extent those women are responsible for their arrogant
perceptions of other women is certainly open to question, but I do not have any
doubt that many of them have been taught to abuse women in this particular way.
I am not interested in assigning responsibility. I am interested in understanding
the phenomenon so as to understand a loving way out of it. I am offering a way
of taking responsibility, of exercising oneself as not doomed to oppress others.
There is something obviously wrong with the love that I was taught and some-
thing right with my failure to love my mother in this way. But I do not think that
what is wrong is my profound desire to identify with her, to see myself in her;
what is wrong is that I was taught to identify with a victim of servitude. What is
wrong is that I was taught to practice servitude of my mother and to learn to be-
come a servant through this practice. There is something obviously wrong with
my having been taught that love is consistent with abuse, consistent with arro-
gant perception.
Notice that the love I was taught is the love that Frye speaks of when she says,
“We can be taken in by this equation of servitude with love” (Frye 1983, 73).
Even though I could both abuse and love my mother, I was not supposed to love
servants. This is because in the case of servants one is supposed to be clear about
their servitude and the “equation of servitude with love” is never to be thought
clearly in those terms. So, I was not supposed to love and could not love servants.
But I could love my mother because deception (in particular, self-​deception) is
part of this “loving.”
In the equation of love with servitude, servitude is called abnegation and ab-
negation is not analyzed any further. Abnegation is not instilled in us through an
analysis of its nature but rather through a heralding of it as beautiful and noble.
We are coaxed, seduced into abnegation not through analysis but through emo-
tive persuasion. Frye makes the connection between deception and this sense of
loving clear. When I say that there is something obviously wrong with the loving
that I was taught, I do not mean to say that the connection between this loving
and abuse is obvious. Rather, I mean that once the connection between this
loving and abuse has been unveiled, there is something obviously wrong with the
loving given that it is obvious that it is wrong to abuse others.
I am glad that I did not learn my lessons well, but it is clear that part of the
mechanism that permitted my not learning well involved a separation from my
mother: I saw us as beings of quite a different sort. It involved abandoning my
mother even while I longed not to abandon her. I wanted to love my mother,
though, given what I was taught, “love” could not be the right word for what
I longed for.
I was disturbed by my not wanting to be what she was. I had a sense of not
being quite integrated, my self was missing because I could not identify with her,
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 109

I could not see myself in her, I could not welcome her “world.” I saw myself as
separate from her, a different sort of being, not quite of the same species. This
separation, this lack of love, I saw, and I think that I saw correctly, as a lack in my-
self (not a fault, but a lack). I also see that if this was a lack of love, love cannot be
what I was taught. It has to be rethought, made anew.
There is something in common between the relation between me and my
mother as someone I did not used to be able to love and the relation between
women of color in the United States like me and white/​Angla women: there is a
failure of love. As I eluded identification with my mother, white/​Angla women
elude identification with women of color, identifications with beings whose sub-
stance they arrogate without a sense of loss. Frye helped me understand one of
the aspects of this failure—​the directly abusive aspect. But I also think that there
is a complex failure of love in the failure to identify with another woman, the
failure to see oneself in other women who are quite different from oneself. I want
to begin to analyze this complex failure.
Notice that Frye’s emphasis on independence in her analysis of loving per-
ception is not particularly helpful in explaining these failures. She says that in
loving perception, “the object of the seeing is another being whose existence and
character are logically independent of the seer and who may be practically or
empirically independent in any particular respect at any particular time” (Frye
1983, 77). But this does not help me understand how my failure of love toward
my mother (when I ceased to be her parasite) left me not quite whole. It is not
helpful since I saw her as logically independent from me. And it also does not
help me understand why the racist or ethnocentric failure of love of white/​Angla
women—​in particular of those white/​Angla women who are not pained by their
failure—​should leave me not quite substantive among them.
I am not particularly interested here in cases of white women’s parasitism onto
women of color but more pointedly in cases where the relation is characterized
by failure of identification. I am interested here in those many cases in which
white/​Angla women do one or more of the following to women of color: they
ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely
alone, interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst. The more inde-
pendent I am, the more independent I am left to be. Their “world” and their in-
tegrity do not require me at all. There is no sense of self-​loss in them for my own
lack of solidity. But they rob me of my solidity through indifference, an indiffer-
ence they can afford and that seems sometimes studied. But many of us have to
work among white/​Anglo folk and our best shot at recognition has seemed to
be among white/​Angla women because many of them have expressed a general
sense of being pained at their failure of love.
Many times white/​Angla women want us out of their field of vision. Their
lack of concern is a harmful failure of love that leaves me independent from
110 Self and Selves

them in a way similar to the way in which, once I ceased to be my mother’s

parasite, she became, though not independent from all others, certainly inde-
pendent from me. But, of course, because my mother and I wanted to love each
other well, we were not whole in this independence. White/​Angla women are
independent from me, I am independent from them; I am independent from
my mother, she is independent from me; and none of us loves each other in
this independence. I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am
profoundly dependent on others without having to be their subordinate, their
slave, their servant.

Identification and Women of Color

The relations among “Women of Color” can neither be homogenized nor

merely wished into being as relations of solidarity. To the extent that Women
of Color names a coalition, it is a coalition in formation against significant and
complex odds that, though familiar, keep standing in our way. The coalition or
interconnecting coalitions need to be conceptualized against the grain of these
odds. Audre Lorde is attentive to the problem of homogenization in coalition
formation when she tells us to explore our relations in terms of “non-​dominant
differences” (Lorde 1984b, 111). The epistemological shift to nondominant
differences is crucial to our possibilities. To the extent that we are “created dif-
ferent” by the logic of domination, the techniques of producing difference in-
clude divide and conquer, segregation, fragmentation, instilling mistrust toward
each other for having been pitted against each other by economies of domina-
tion, instilling in us the distinction between the real and the fake. Here I will
not address each one of these techniques of keeping us focused on dominant
differences among each other, that is differences concocted by the dominant im-
agination. Rather, I will emphasize the epistemological shift to nondominant
differences.
To the extent that in resistance to oppressions, both men and women have his-
torically fashioned resistant “communities,” resistant socialities that have made
meanings that have enabled us to endure as resistant subjects in the oppressing
↔ resisting relation, we have created alternate historical lines that are in connec-
tion with each other—​they do not exist in isolation—​lines that we do not under-
stand, as nothing requires that we understand the spatio-​temporal differences
among us. Systems of domination construct women of color as subordinate,
inferior, servile. We can see each other enacting these dominant constructions,
even when we do it against our own desire, will, and energy. We can see and un-
derstand these animations of the dominant imaginary, but we are not sufficiently
familiar with each other’s “worlds” of resistance to either cross, or travel to them,
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 111

nor to avoid what keeps us from seeing the need to travel, the enriching of our
possibilities through “world”-​travel.
There is an important sense in which we do not understand each other as in-
terdependent and we do not identify with each other since we lack insight into
each other’s resistant understandings. To put the point sharply, the resistant
understandings do not travel through social fragmentation. Separatism in com-
munities where our substance is seen and celebrated, where we become sub-
stantive through this celebration, combines with social fragmentation to keep
our lines of resistance away from each other. Thus, it is difficult for women of
color to see, know each other, as resistant rather than as constructed by domina-
tion. To the extent that we face each other as oppressed, we do not want to iden-
tify with each other, we repel each other as we are seeing each other in the same
mirror.2 As resistant, we are kept apart by social fragmentation. To identify with
each other, we need to engage in resistant practices that appear dangerous. We
have not realized the potential lying in our becoming interdependently resistant.
As resistant, we appear independent from each other to each other. The coali-
tion sense of “Women of Color” necessitates this identification that comes from
seeing ourselves and each other interrelating “worlds” of resistant meaning. To
the extent that identification requires sameness, this coalition is impossible. So,
the coalition requires that we conceive identification anew. The independence
of women of color from each other performed by social fragmentation leaves us
unwittingly colluding with the logic of oppression.

“Worlds” and “World”-​Traveling

Frye says that the loving eye is “the eye of one who knows that to know the seen,
one must consult something other than one’s own will and interests and fears
and imagination” (Frye 1983, 75). This is much more helpful to me so long as
I do not understand her to mean that I should not consult my own interests nor
that I should exclude the possibility that my self and the self of the one I love may
be importantly tied to each other in many complicated ways. Since I am empha-
sizing here that the failure of love lies in part in the failure to identify, and since
I agree with Frye that one “must consult something other than one’s own will
and interests and fears and imagination,” I will explain what I think needs to be
consulted. It was not possible for me to love my mother while I retained a sense
that it was fine for me and others to see her arrogantly. Loving my mother also re-
quired that I see with her eyes, that I go into my mother’s “world,” that I see both
of us as we are constructed in her “world,” that I witness her own sense of herself
from within her “world.” Only through this traveling to her “world” could I iden-
tify with her because only then could I cease to ignore her and to be excluded and
112 Self and Selves

separate from her. Only then could I see her as a subject, even if one subjected,
and only then could I see how meaning could arise fully between us. We are fully
dependent on each other for the possibility of being understood and without this
understanding we are not intelligible, we do not make sense, we are not solid,
visible, integrated; we are lacking. So traveling to each other’s “worlds” would en-
able us to be through loving each other.
I hope the sense of identification I have in mind is becoming clear. But to be-
come clearer, I need to explain what I mean by a “world” and by “traveling” to
another “world.” In explaining what I mean by a “world,” I will not appeal to trav-
eling to other women’s “worlds.” Instead, I will lead you to see what I mean by a
“world” the way I came to propose the concept to myself: through the kind of on-
tological confusion about myself that we, women of color, refer to half-​jokingly
as “schizophrenia” (we feel schizophrenic in our goings back and forth between
different “communities”) and through my effort to make some sense of this on-
tological confusion.
Some time ago I came to be in a state of profound confusion as I experienced
myself as both having and not having a particular attribute. I was sure I had the
attribute in question and, on the other hand, I was sure that I did not have it. I re-
main convinced that I both have and do not have this attribute. The attribute is
playfulness. I am sure that I am a playful person. On the other hand, I can say,
painfully, that I am not a playful person. I am not a playful person in certain
“worlds.” One of the things I did as I became confused was to call my friends,
far away people who knew me well, to see whether or not I was playful. Maybe
they could help me out of my confusion. They said to me, “Of course you are
playful,” and they said it with the same conviction that I had about it. Of course
I am playful. Those people who were around me said to me, “No, you are not
playful. You are a serious woman. You just take everything seriously.”3 They were
just as sure about what they said to me and could offer me every bit of evidence
that one could need to conclude that they were right. So I said to myself, “Okay,
maybe what’s happening here is that there is an attribute that I do have but there
are certain ‘worlds’ in which I am not at ease and it is because I’m not at ease in
those ‘worlds’ that I don’t have that attribute in those ‘worlds.’ But what does that
mean?” I was worried both about what I meant by “worlds” when I said, “In some
‘worlds’ I do not have the attribute” and what I meant by saying that lack of ease
was what led me not to be playful in those “worlds.” Because, you see, if it was just
a matter of lack of ease, I could work on it.
I can explain some of what I mean by a “world.” I do not want the fixity of a
definition at this point, because I think the term is suggestive and I do not want to
close the suggestiveness of it too soon. I can offer some characteristics that serve
to distinguish between a “world,” a utopia, a possible “world” in the philosoph-
ical sense, and a “world” view. By a “world” I do not mean a utopia at all. A utopia
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 113

does not count as a “world,” in my sense. The “worlds” that I am talking about
are possible. But a possible “world” is not what I mean by a “world” and I do not
mean a “world”-​view, though something like a “world”-​view is involved here.
For something to be a “world” in my sense, it has to be inhabited at present
by some flesh and blood people. That is why it cannot be a utopia. It may also be
inhabited by some imaginary people. It may be inhabited by people who are dead
or people that the inhabitants of this “world” met in some other “world” and now
have in this “world” in imagination.
A “world” in my sense may be an actual society, given its dominant culture’s
description and construction of life, including a construction of the relationships
of production, of gender, race, and so on. But a “world” can also be such a so-
ciety given a nondominant, a resistant construction, or it can be such a society
or a society given an idiosyncratic construction. As we will see, it is problematic
to say that these are all constructions of the same society. But they are different
“worlds.”
A “world” need not be a construction of a whole society. It may be a construc-
tion of a tiny portion of a particular society. It may be inhabited by just a few
people. Some “worlds” are bigger than others.
A “world” may be incomplete. Things in it may not be altogether constructed
or some things may be constructed negatively (they are not what “they” are in
some other “world”). Or the “world” may be incomplete because it may have
references to things that do not quite exist in it, references to things like Brazil,
where Brazil is not quite part of that “world.” Given lesbian feminism, the con-
struction of “lesbian” is purposefully and healthily still up in the air, in the pro-
cess of becoming. What it is to be a Hispanic in this country is, in a dominant
Anglo construction, purposefully incomplete. Thus, one cannot really answer
questions like “What is a Hispanic?” “Who counts as a Hispanic?” “Are Latinos,
Chicanos, Hispanos, black Dominicans, white Cubans, Korean Colombians,
Italian Argentinians, Hispanic?” What it is to be a “Hispanic” in the varied so-​
called Hispanic communities in the United States is also yet up in the air. “We”
have not yet decided whether there is something like a “Hispanic” in our varied
“worlds.”4 So, a “world” may be an incomplete visionary nonutopian construc-
tion of life, or it may be a traditional construction of life. A traditional Hispano
construction of northern New Mexican life is a “world.” Such a traditional con-
struction, in the face of a racist, ethnocentric, money-​centered Anglo construc-
tion of northern New Mexican life, is highly unstable because Anglos have the
means for imperialist destruction of traditional Hispano “worlds.”
In a “world,” some of the inhabitants may not understand or hold the partic-
ular construction of them that constructs them in that “world.” So, there may be
“worlds” that construct me in ways that I do not even understand. Or, it may be
that I understand the construction, but do not hold it of myself. I may not accept
114 Self and Selves

it as an account of myself, a construction of myself. And yet, I may be animating

such a construction.5
One can “travel” between these “worlds” and one can inhabit more than one of
these “worlds” at the same time. I think that most of us who are outside the main-
stream of, for example, the United States’ dominant construction or organization
of life are “world”-​travelers as a matter of necessity and of survival. It seems to
me that inhabiting more than one “world” at the same time and “traveling” be-
tween “worlds” is part and parcel of our experience and our situation. One can
be at the same time in a “world” that constructs one as stereotypically Latina, for
example, and in a “world” that constructs one as simply Latina. Being stereotyp-
ically Latina and being simply Latina are different simultaneous constructions of
persons who are part of different “worlds.” One animates one or the other or both
at the same time without necessarily confusing them, though simultaneous en-
actment can be confusing if one is not on one’s guard.
In describing my sense of a “world,” I am offering a description of experi-
ence, something that is true to experience even if it is ontologically problematic.
Though I would think that any account of identity that could not be true to this
experience of outsiders to the mainstream would be faulty, even if ontologically
unproblematic. Its ease would constrain, erase, or deem aberrant experience that
has within it significant insights into nonimperialistic understanding between
people.
Those of us who are “world”-​travelers have the distinct experience of being
different in different “worlds” and of having the capacity to remember other
“worlds” and ourselves in them. We can say, “That is me there, and I am happy
in that ‘world.’ ” So, the experience is of being a different person in different
“worlds” and yet of having memory of oneself as different without quite
having the sense of there being any underlying “I.” When I can say, “That is
me there and I am so playful in that ‘world,’ ” I am saying, “That is me in that
‘world’ ” not because I recognize myself in that person; rather, the first-​person
statement is noninferential. I may well recognize that that person has abilities
that I do not have and yet the having or not having of the abilities is always an
“I have . . .” and “I do not have . . .” (that is, it is always experienced in the first
person).
The shift from being one person to being a different person is what I call “trav-
eling.” This shift may not be willful or even conscious, and one may be completely
unaware of being different in a different “world,” and may not recognize that
one is in a different “world.” Even though the shift can be done willfully, it is not
a matter of acting. One does not pose as someone else; one does not pretend
to be, for example, someone of a different personality or character or someone
who uses space or language differently from the other person. Rather, one is
someone who has that personality or character or uses space and language in that
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 115

particular way. The “one” here does not refer to some underlying “I.” One does
not experience any underlying “I.”

Being at Ease in a “World”

In investigating what I mean by “being at ease in a ‘world,’ ” I will describe dif-

ferent ways of being at ease. One may be at ease in one or in all of these ways.
There is a maximal way of being at ease, namely, being at ease in all of these ways.
I take this maximal way of being at ease to be somewhat dangerous because it
tends to produce people who have no inclination to travel across “worlds” or no
experience of “world”-​traveling.
The first way of being at ease in a particular “world” is by being a fluent speaker
in that “world.” I know all the norms that there are to be followed. I know all the
words that there are to be spoken. I know all the moves. I am confident.
Another way of being at ease is by being normatively happy. I agree with all the
norms, I could not love any norms better. I am asked to do just what I want to do
or what I think I should do. I am at ease.
Another way of being at ease in a “world” is by being humanly bonded. I am
with those I love and they love me, too. It should be noticed that I may be with
those I love and be at ease because of them in a “world” that is otherwise as hos-
tile to me as “worlds” get.
Finally, one may be at ease because one has a history with others that is shared,
especially daily history, the kind of shared history that one sees exemplified by
the response to the “Do you remember poodle skirts?” question. There you are,
with people you do not know at all and who do not know each other. The ques-
tion is posed and then everyone begins talking about their poodle skirt stories.
I have been in such situations without knowing what poodle skirts, for example,
were, and I felt ill at ease because it was not my history. The other people did not
know each other. It is not that they were humanly bonded. Probably they did not
have much politically in common either. But poodle skirts were in their shared
history.
One may be at ease in one of these ways or in all of them. Notice that when
one says meaningfully, “This is my ‘world,’ ” one may not be at ease in it. Or
one may be at ease in it only in some of these respects and not in others. To
say of some “world” that it is “my world” is to make an evaluation. One may
privilege one or more “worlds” in this way for a variety of reasons: for ex-
ample, because one experiences oneself as an agent in a fuller sense than one
experiences oneself in other “worlds.” One may disown a “world” because one
has first-​person memories of a person who is so thoroughly dominated that
she has no sense of exercising her own will or has a sense of having serious
116 Self and Selves

difficulties in performing actions that are willed by herself and no difficulty in

performing actions willed by others. One may say of a “world” that it is “my
world” because one is at ease in it (that is, being at ease in a “world” may be the
basis for the evaluation).
Given the clarification of what I mean by a “world,” “ ‘world’-​travel,” and being
at ease in a “world,” we are in a position to return to my problematic attribute,
playfulness. It may be that in this “world” in which I am so unplayful, I am a
different person than in the “world” in which I am playful. Or it may be that
the “world” in which I am unplayful is constructed in such a way that I could be
playful in it. I could practice, even though that “world” is constructed in such a
way that my being playful in it is kind of hard. In describing what I take a “world”
to be, I emphasized the first possibility as both the one that is truest to the expe-
rience of “outsiders” to the mainstream and as ontologically problematic because
the “I” is identified in some sense as one and in some sense as a plurality. I iden-
tify myself as myself through memory and I retain myself as different in memory.
When I travel from one “world” to another, I have this image, this memory of
myself as playful in this other “world.” I can then be in a particular “world” and
have a double image of myself as, for example, playful and as not playful. This is
a very familiar and recognizable phenomenon to the outsider to the mainstream
in some central cases: when in one “world” I animate, for example, that world’s
caricature of the person I am in the other “world.” I can have both images of my-
self, and, to the extent that I can materialize or animate both images at the same
time, I become an ambiguous being. This is very much a part of trickery and
foolery. It is worth remembering that the trickster and the fool are significant
characters in many nondominant or outsider cultures. One then sees any partic-
ular “world” with these double edges and sees absurdity in them and so inhabits
oneself differently.
Given that Latins are constructed in Anglo “worlds” as stereotypically
intense—​intensity being a central characteristic of at least one of the Anglo
stereotypes of Latinas—​and given that many Latinas, myself included, are gen-
uinely intense, I can say to myself “I am intense” and take a hold of the double
meaning. Furthermore, I can be stereotypically intense or be the real thing, and,
if you are Anglo, you do not know when I am which because I am Latin American.
As a Latin American I am an ambiguous being, a two-​imaged self: I can see that
gringos see me as stereotypically intense because I am, as a Latin American,
constructed that way but I may or may not intentionally animate the stereotype
or the real thing knowing that you may not see it in anything other than in the
stereotypical construction. This ambiguity is funny and is not just funny; it is
survival-​rich. We can also make the picture of those who dominate us funny pre-
cisely because we can see the double edge, we can see them doubly constructed,
we can see the plurality in them. So we know truths that only the fool can speak
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 117

and only the trickster can play out without harm. We inhabit “worlds” and travel
across them and keep all the memories.
Sometimes, the “world”-​traveler has a double image of herself and each self
includes as important ingredients of itself one or more attributes that are incom-
patible with one or more of the attributes of the other self: for example, being
playful and being unplayful. To the extent that the attribute is an important in-
gredient of the self she is in that “world” (that is, to the extent that there is a par-
ticularly good fit between that “world” and her having that attribute in it, and
to the extent that the attribute is personality or character central, that “world”
would have to be changed if she is to be playful in it). It is not the case that if she
could come to be at ease in it, she would be her own playful self. Because the at-
tribute is personality or character central and there is such a good fit between
that “world” and her being constructed with that attribute as central, she cannot
become playful, she is unplayful. To become playful would be, for her, to become
a contradictory being.
I suggest, then, that my problematic case, the being and not being playful,
cannot be solved through lack of ease. I suggest that I can understand my confu-
sion about whether I am or am not playful by saying that I am both and that I am
different persons in different “worlds” and can remember myself in both as I am
in the other. I am a plurality of selves. This explains my confusion because it is to
come to see it as of a piece with much of the rest of my experience as an outsider in
some of the “worlds” that I inhabit and of a piece with significant aspects of the
experience of nondominant people in the “worlds” of their dominators.
So, though I may not be at ease in the “worlds” in which I am not constructed
playful, it is not that I am not playful because I am not at ease. The two are com-
patible. But lack of playfulness is not caused by lack of ease. Lack of playfulness is
not symptomatic of lack of ease but of lack of health. I am not a healthy being in
the “worlds” that construct me unplayful.

Playfulness

I had a very personal stake in investigating this topic. Playfulness is not only the
attribute that was the source of my confusion and the attitude that I recommend
as the loving attitude in traveling across “worlds.” I am also scared of ending up
a serious human being, someone with no multidimensionality, with no fun in
life, someone who is just someone who has had the fun constructed out of her.
I am seriously scared of getting stuck in a “world” that constructs me that way, a
“world” that I have no escape from and in which I cannot be playful.
I thought about what it is to be playful and what it is to play and I did this
thinking in a “world” in which I only remember myself as playful and in which
118 Self and Selves

all of those who know me as playful are imaginary beings. It is a “world” in which
I am scared of losing my memories of myself as playful or have them erased from
me. Because I live in such a “world,” after I formulated my own sense of what it is
to be playful and to play, I decided that I needed to go to the literature. I read two
classics on the subject: Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1968) and Hans-​Georg
Gadamer’s chapter on the concept of play in his Truth and Method (1975). I dis-
covered, to my amazement, that what I thought about play and playfulness, if
they were right, was absolutely wrong. Though I will not provide the arguments
for this interpretation of Gadamer and Huizinga here, I understood that both
of them have an agonistic sense of play. “Play” and “playfulness” have—​in their
use—​ultimately, to do with contest, with winning, losing, battling. The sense of
playfulness that I have in mind has nothing to do with agon. So, I tried to eluci-
date both senses of play and playfulness by contrasting them to each other. The
contrast helped me see the attitude that I have in mind as the loving attitude in
traveling across “worlds” more clearly.
An agonistic sense of playfulness is one in which competence is central. You’d
better know the rules of the game. In agonistic play there is risk, there is uncer-
tainty, but the uncertainty is about who is going to win and who is going to lose.
There are rules that inspire hostility. The attitude of playfulness is conceived as
secondary to or derivative from play. Since play is agon, then the only conceiv-
able playful attitude is an agonistic one: the attitude does not turn an activity
into play, but rather presupposes an activity that is play. One of the paradigmatic
ways of playing for both Gadamer and Huizinga is role-​playing. In role-​playing,
the person who is a participant in the game has a fixed conception of him-​or her-
self. I also think that the players are imbued with self-​importance in agonistic
play since they are so keen on winning given their own merits, their very own
competence.
When considering the value of “world”-​traveling and whether playfulness is
the loving attitude to have while traveling, I recognized the agonistic attitude as
inimical to traveling across “worlds.” The agonistic traveler is a conqueror, an
imperialist. Huizinga, in his classic book on play, interprets Western civiliza-
tion as play. That is an interesting thing for Third World people to think about.
Western civilization has been interpreted by a white Western man as play in the
agonistic sense of play. Huizinga reviews Western law, art, and any other aspects
of Western culture and sees agon in all of them. Agonistic playfulness leads those
who attempt to travel to another “world” with this attitude to failure. Agonistic
travelers cannot attempt travel in this sense. Their traveling is always a trying that
is tied to conquest, domination, reduction of what they meet to their own sense
of order, and erasure of the other “world.” That is what assimilation is all about.
Assimilation is an agonistic project of destruction of other people’s “worlds.” So,
the agonistic attitude, the playful attitude given Western man’s construction of
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 119

playfulness, is not a healthy, loving attitude to have in traveling across “worlds.”

Given the agonistic attitude, one cannot travel across “worlds,” though one can
kill other “worlds” with it.6 So, for people who are interested in crossing racial
and ethnic boundaries, an arrogant Western man’s construction of playfulness
is deadly. One cannot cross the boundaries with it. One needs to give up such an
attitude if one wants to travel.
What, then, is the loving playfulness that I have in mind? Let me begin with
one example: We are by the riverbank. The river is very low. Almost dry. Bits of
water here and there. Little pools with a few trout hiding under the rocks. But it
is mostly wet stones, gray on the outside. We walk on the stones for a while. You
pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and
it is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the
pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to
you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones
for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playful-
ness of our activity does not presuppose that there is something like “crashing
stones” that is a particular form of play with its own rules. Instead, the attitude
that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play.
Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both
understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity
includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise.
This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the “world” to be
neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not
self-​important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which
is part of saying that we are open to self-​construction. We may not have rules, and
when we do have them, there are no rules that are to us sacred. We are not worried
about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While
playful, we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular
“world.” We are there creatively. We are not passive.7
Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of
not worrying about competence, not being self-​important, not taking norms as
sacred, and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.
So, positively, the playful attitude involves openness to surprise, openness to
being a fool, openness to self-​construction or reconstruction and to construction
or reconstruction of the “worlds” we inhabit playfully, and thus openness to risk
the ground that constructs us as oppressors or as oppressed or as collaborating
or colluding with oppression. Negatively, playfulness is characterized by uncer-
tainty, lack of self-​importance, absence of rules or not taking rules as sacred, not
worrying about competence, and lack of abandonment to a particular construc-
tion of oneself, others, and one’s relation to them. In attempting to take a hold
of oneself and of one’s relation to others in a particular “world,” one may study,
120 Self and Selves

examine, and come to understand oneself. One may then see what the possibil-
ities for play are for the being one is in that “world.” One may even decide to in-
habit that self fully to understand it better and find its creative possibilities.

There are “worlds” we enter at our own risk, “worlds” that have agon, conquest, and
arrogance as the main ingredients in their ethos. These are “worlds” that we enter out
of necessity and that would be foolish to enter playfully in either the agonistic sense
or in my sense. In such “worlds,” we are not playful. To be in those “worlds” in resist-
ance to their construction of ourselves as passive, servile, and inferior is to inhabit
those selves ambiguously, through our first-​person memories of lively subjectivity.
But there are “worlds” that we can travel to lovingly, and traveling to them is
part of loving at least some of their inhabitants. The reason I think that traveling
to someone’s “world” is a way of identifying with them is that by traveling to their
“world” we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves
in their eyes. Only when we have traveled to each other’s “worlds” are we fully
subjects to each other. (I agree with Hegel that self-​recognition requires other
subjects, but I disagree with his claim that it requires tension or hostility.)
Knowing other women’s “worlds” is part of knowing them and knowing them
is part of loving them. Notice that the knowing can be done in greater or lesser
depth, as can the loving. Traveling to another’s “world” is not the same as be-
coming intimate with them. Intimacy is constituted in part by a very deep know-
ledge of the other self. “World”-​traveling is only part of the process of coming
to have this knowledge. Also, notice that some people, in particular those who
are outsiders to the mainstream, can be known only to the extent that they are
known in several “worlds” and as “world”-​travelers.
Without knowing the other’s “world,” one does not know the other, and
without knowing the other, one is really alone in the other’s presence because the
other is only dimly present to one.
By traveling to other people’s “worlds,” we discover that there are “worlds”
in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects,
lively beings, resisters, constructors of visions even though in the mainstream
construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable,
foldable, file-​awayable, classifiable. I always imagine the Aristotelian slave as pli-
able and foldable at night or after he or she cannot work anymore (when he or she
dies as a tool).8 Aristotle tells us nothing about the slave apart from the master.
We know the slave only through the master. The slave is a tool of the master. After
working hours, he or she is folded and placed in a drawer until the next morning.
My mother was apparent to me mostly as a victim of arrogant perception.
I was loyal to the arrogant perceiver’s construction of her and thus disloyal to her
in assuming that she was exhausted by that construction. I was unwilling to be
like her and thought that identifying with her, seeing myself in her, necessitated
 “World”-Traveling and Loving Perception 121

that I become like her. I was wrong both in assuming that she was exhausted by
the arrogant perceiver’s construction of her and in my understanding of iden-
tification. I do not think I was wrong in thinking that identification was part
of loving and that it involved in part my seeing myself in her. I came to realize
through traveling to her “world” that she is not foldable and pliable, that she is
not exhausted by the mainstream Argentinian patriarchal construction of her.
I came to realize that there are “worlds” in which she shines as a creative being.
Seeing myself in her through traveling to her “world” has meant seeing how dif-
ferent from her I am in her “world.”9
So, in recommending “world”-​ traveling and identification through
“world”-​traveling as part of loving other women, I am suggesting disloyalty
to arrogant perceivers, including the arrogant perceiver in ourselves, and to
their constructions of women and to their constructions of powerful barriers
between women. As Women of Color, we cannot stand on any ground that is
not also a crossing. To enter playfully into each other’s “worlds” of subjective
affirmation also risks those aspects of resistance that have kept us riveted
on constructions of ourselves that have kept us from seeing multiply, from
understanding the interconnections in our historico-​spatialities. Playful
“world”-​travel is thus not assimilable to the middle-​class leisurely journey
nor the colonial or imperialist journeys. None of these involve risking one’s
ground. These forms of displacement may well be compatible with agonistic
playfulness, but they are incompatible with the attitude of play that is an
openness to surprise and that inclines us to “world”-​travel in the direction of
deep coalition.

Notes

1. This chapter was first published in 1987 and reprinted in María Lugones’s Pilgrimages/​
Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, 77–​100 (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). It is reprinted here with slight modifications with
the permission of the author and press.
2. See Audre Lorde’s treatment of horizontal anger in “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred,
and Anger” (Lorde 1984a). Lorde understands black women seeing the servile con-
struction of themselves in each other with anger, hatred.
3. It is important that I have been thought a person without humor by whites/​Anglos
inside the US academy, a space where struggles against race/​gender and sexual op-
pression require an articulation of these issues. I have been found playful by my
companions in struggles against white/​Anglo control of land and water in the US
Southwest. Those struggles have occurred in the space-​time of Chicano communities.
Being playful or not playful becomes in those two contexts deep traits, symptomatic of
larger incongruities.
122 Self and Selves

4. This “we” embraces the very many strands of Latinos in the United States. But this “we”
is unusually spoken with ease. The tension in the “we” includes those who do not reject
“Hispanic” as a term of identification.
5. Indeed people inhabit constructions of themselves in “worlds” they refuse to enter.
This is true particularly of those who oppress those whose resistant “worlds” they
refuse to enter. But they are indeed inhabitants of those “worlds.” And indeed those
who are oppressed animate oppressive constructions of themselves in the “worlds” of
their oppressors.
6. Consider the congruities between the middle-​class leisurely journey that Janet Wolff
describes and the agonistic sense of play (Wolff 1992).
7. One can understand why this sense of playfulness is one that one may exercise in re-
sistance to oppression when resistance is not reducible to reaction. Nonreactive resist-
ance is creative; it exceeds that which is being resisted. The creation of new meaning
lies outside of rules, particularly the rules of the “world” being resisted.
8. But I can also imagine the Aristotelian slave after hours as an animal without the ca-
pacity to reason. In that case, roaming in the fields, eating, and copulating would be
distinctly passionate activities where passion and reason are dichotomized. Imagining
people who are taken into servility in this manner is what leads oppressors to think of
those they attempt to dominate both as dangerous and as nonpersons.
9. The traveling also permitted me to see her resistances in plain view in my daily life. She
did not hide resistance.

References
Frye, Marilyn. 1983. “In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love.” In The Politics of
Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye, 52–​83. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing
Press.
Gadamer, Hans-​George. 1975. Truth and Method. Translated by William Glen-​Doepel,
edited by John Cumming and Garrett Barden. New York: Seabury Press.
Huizinga, Johan. 1968. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-​Element in Culture. Translated
by R. F. C. Hull. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores.
Lorde, Audre. 1984a. “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger.” In Sister Outsider by
Audre Lorde, 145–​175. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1984b. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” In
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, 145–​175. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Wolff, Janet. 1992. “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Cultural Criticism.”
Cultural Studies 7 (2): 224–​39.
 6
Symptoms in Particular
Feminism and the Disordered Mind
Jennifer Radden

Fundamentally incompatible assumptions separate most feminist theorizing

from influential explanatory models associated with medical psychiatry and
cognitive psychology that portray disorder as emanating from the dysfunc-
tional brain of each patient. For feminist theory, by contrast, any disorder afflicts
a socially and culturally embedded subject, and thus is generated out of inter-
play between bodily, interpersonal, cultural, and environmental factors. After
sketching these differences, I turn to the implications of the feminist analysis for
how we think about psychiatric symptoms viewed as the voiced report of the
sufferer. When not reduced to inessential, downstream, “symptomatic” effects
of brain dysfunction, symptoms and symptom descriptions acquire a different
prominence and status as salient and distinctive cases of situated, but vulnerable,
knowing. Because of unresolved issues relating to testimonial competence, they
also reveal unfinished business for accounts of epistemic justice. Most feminist
theorizing was ahead of its time, I conclude. Yet further analysis is required once
we turn our attention to symptoms in particular.
In the first section, medical and cognitivist conceptions of mind are noted
briefly, with their associated explanations of mental disorder.1 Challenges to
such medical and cognitivist positions are introduced in the second section, in-
cluding those arising from feminist theorizing about the “mind” or subject. The
discussion adopts a revised ontology of psychiatric symptoms, at least as they
indicate the mood disorders of depression and anxiety that are the most consist-
ently attributed to, and diagnosed in, women. In the third section, the place of
symptoms in relation to feminist theorizing about epistemic justice, and testi-
mony is introduced.

Medico-​Cognitivist Explanatory Models

By the middle decades of the twentieth century, medical models of disorder

increasingly dominated psychiatry, psychiatric research, much philosophy of

Jennifer Radden, Symptoms in Particular In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0007
124 Self and Selves

psychiatry, and other theoretical writing.2 On these accounts, the observable

manifestations of mental disorder result from underlying dysfunction located
within the individual’s brain. Mental disorders are not merely disease-​like, but
true diseases, only distinguishable in insignificant ways from other, better-​
understood bodily conditions, whose observable signs and symptoms emanate
from internal morbidity or dysfunction.
Cognitivism similarly directs itself toward the brain of the individual, this time
through features of brain functioning sharing structural similarities with artificial
intelligence. Its core assumptions are that cognitive processes and capacities de-
pend on information processing; and that cognitive explanations are in some broad
sense mechanistic (Von Eckardt 2012; Cratsley and Samuels 2013). At the center
of the analysis is brain functioning, rather than the brain as an organ: in principle,
computations can run on silicon-​based hardware, and “nothing like a human body
seems required for cognition,” it has been pointed out (Gallagher 2005, 134). In
recognition of their commonalities, and for brevity, these models from medicine
and cognitivism will here be referred to as “medico-​cognitivist.” Of their many
shared features, focus in the present chapter is on three weaknesses that are partic-
ularly highlighted by feminist theorizing: (1) the association of disorder with the
individual’s brain or brain functioning; (2) the analysis of symptoms as downstream
effects of that brain or brain functioning; and (3) a conception of disorders as sepa-
rable, discretely bounded entities analogous to bacterially caused diseases.
These medico-​ cognitivist paradigms may bear only indirectly on clinical
practice, it is worth noting. The care of mental disorder exhibits many goals and
approaches consistent with the attitudes of feminist care ethics. In attending to
and addressing psychiatric symptoms, much treatment shows respect for the ep-
istemic authority and self-​narrative of the individual patient, a point to which
we’ll return in the third section of this chapter. Effective treatment and therapeutic
goals are typically measured in terms of the interpersonal adjustment of a socially
embedded, or relational, self (Frank and Frank 1993; Waring 2016; Tekin 2017).
Moreover, unlike a technical expert delivering services to a client, the dyadic re-
lationship between carer and patient is often assumed to be definitive of, and es-
sential for, effective care and treatment (Frank and Frank 1993; Radden and Sadler
2010). In respects like these, feminism need have little quarrel with mental health
care. While not unaffected by the explanatory models sketched above, much clin-
ical practice proceeds at a considerable remove from, and often regardless of, them.

Challenges to Medico-​Cognitivist Models

The presuppositions of the medical model, particularly, have been subject to in-
sistent critique since the last decades of the twentieth century—​critiques arising
 Symptoms in Particular 125

within feminist thought, and also independently of it. Largely taking place out-
side of feminism, for example, were the antipsychiatry ideas of the 1960s and
1970s, whose particular target was mental illness and the institutions sur-
rounding its treatment and care.3 Similarly antithetical to the medical model
and again adopted both within and beyond feminist thought are forms of social
constructionism. According to feminist social constructionist accounts, asso-
ciations that have allied the feminine with madness and a want of reason are
the historical effects of misogyny, sexism, and oppressive power (Nissim-​Sabat
2013). More generally, challenges to ideas making up medico-​cognitivist models
have come from every corner. Even in its earliest formulations, for example,
cognitivism was criticized by the ecological positions emphasizing “the envi-
ronment that the mind has been shaped to meet,” over any theoretical models
(Neisser 1976, 7–​8). More recently, classical cognitivism has also been subject
to revision. Embodied (or “situated”) cognitive science recognizes the mind to
be a system in which brain, body, and world are equally important elements
(Gallagher 2011; Tschacher and Bergomi 2011; Bluhm et al. 2012).4 And, in en-
active cognition theory or “enactivism,” cognition is achieved through feedback
and flow between body, sensory processing, and affordances in the surrounding
environment (Durt et al. 2017).
Any attempt to isolate feminist critiques of medico-​ cognitivism’s disor-
dered mind or subject from critiques arising within these concurrent streams
(antipsychiatry, social constructionism, ecological and embodied, enactivist,
or situated cognitivism), will have limited success: these challenges have been
intermixed and mutually influential.
Among such challenges to medico-​cognitivist paradigms, attacks on nat-
uralism, metaphysical realism, and traditional epistemology have been more
and less general, with many expressly directed toward mental disorder. For ex-
ample, the view that, like “gender,” “mental illness” is socially constructed and
historically contingent (a position frequently accepted by feminists), remains
quite compatible with the assumption that other scientific concepts might rest
on a more enduring ontological footing.5 Of course even over the specific case
of mental illness, let alone over broader claims about objectivity, nature, and
science, feminists have not spoken with one voice: their positions range from
extreme social constructionism and postmodernism, to acceptance of classical
realist assumptions.
As well as revising more fundamental concepts with implications for ideas
about mental disorder, such as those of “subject,” “person,” “science,” and “know-
ledge,” feminists directed particular attention to the meaning, classification, ex-
planation, treatment, and care of such conditions. Feminist analyses of women
and madness have a long and distinguished history that includes Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s incendiary Yellow Wallpaper (2015) first published in 1892,
126 Self and Selves

together with work from the 1970s and 1980s like Phyllis Chessler’s Women and
Madness (1972). Ostensibly, analyses such as these are distinct from broader
feminist theorizing about subjectivity, science, and epistemic justice, but one aim
here is to elucidate links between these two bodies of writing.
Critiques of Freudian analyses of women were followed by emphasis on cases
of women’s enforced institutionalization, as well as more symbolic harms of dis-
empowerment and silencing.6 The cultural legacy of binaries assigning women
and the feminine to illogic, emotionality, subjectivity, the bodily, and to mad-
ness itself, were also exposed (Lloyd 2004; Showalter 1985; S. Gilman 1985). And
feminist thinkers have drawn attention to the medicalization of women’s normal
traits: to research neglect and distortion of gender-​linked disorders such as de-
pression and anxiety; to separate and unequal treatments offered women; to the
mental health vulnerabilities associated with traditional women’s roles and iden-
tities; and to diagnosis and treatment understood as tools of patriarchal social
control (Russell 1995; Ussher 1991; Busfield 1986; Bluhm 2011). Their inquiries
repeatedly take issue with traditional explanations of mental disorder in women,
whether those explanations are derived from women’s alleged psychological and
affective nature, or invoke biological assumptions involving hormonal instabil-
ities, reproductive cycles and life phases, or genetic predispositions (Bluhm
2011). Much of this early work focused on mood disorders, especially depres-
sion. Women have been disproportionately diagnosed and treated as suffering
mental disorder, it was pointed out: Why?
The answers offered emphasize the ways patriarchal systems leave women vul-
nerable both to actual disorder, and to the diagnosis and treatment of misnamed
“disorder.”7 Before reviewing such differing kinds of explanation, however, we
need to consider the broader theorizing guiding them, by asking: What is the
“mental” in feminist philosophy of mind?
Feminist accounts have generally been wary of strong mind-​to-​body reduc-
tionism, accepting that mental processes are distinguishable from, even if de-
pendent on, physical processes.8 But any robust dualism separating mind from
body is also usually eschewed for its Cartesian taint. This has left “mind” a treach-
erous category, often avoided entirely, and thought best retired from use. The pre-
ferred targets of feminist analysis have been thicker entities than minds: selves,
persons, and agents. And it is to them that we can most fruitfully turn as we seek
implications about the special case of disordered “mentality.”
Whichever category is employed, self, person, agent—​or mind—​feminist
conceptual revisions and reconstructions consistently emphasize the features
of embodiment and social and cultural embeddedness. In feminist and non-
feminist writing alike, the disembodied mind is widely deemed mistaken, even
incoherent. Minds, like subjects, are necessarily embodied. The subject’s embod-
iment is explained by feminists in a number of different ways. For example, the
 Symptoms in Particular 127

continuity of the first-​person perspective provided by embodiment is what makes

us persons; personal lives in this way “encompass” our organic lives (Baker 2000).
Although Baker’s philosophy of mind is not specifically directed toward mental
illness, it is evident that, disordered or not, all mental and bodily processes are
inextricably entwined.9 And such embodiment is required for agency, the sense
of identity and personhood in which we reflect about what we intend to do, and
then act. Without embodiment, “practical identity,” that is, oneself understood
as a doer, and awareness of that status, would not be possible (Korsgaard 1989;
Meyers 1997; Baker 2000). Agency is also linked to more political conceptions of
autonomy in these analyses. As victims of patriarchal power, externally imposed
and internalized social roles, and other evidence of system-​wide gender bias,
women have often been deprived of the possibility of exercising autonomy.
Nonetheless, feminist theorists have stressed the social, relational, or intersub-
jective context even required for the development of a capacity for autonomy,
including socialization that promotes self-​reflection and other “autonomy com-
petencies” (Friedman 1988, 39–​40).10
Conceptions of selves, persons, and agents differ from one another in both
emphasis and substance, but as subjects, selves, persons, and agents share the
broad features identified in the following discussion, including the second fea-
ture of the self/​person/​agent: its status as relational, or socially embedded. And
by rejecting the individualistic explanations presupposed by medico-​cognitivist
models of disorder, embeddedness serves as a corrective. Feminists emphasize
the inherently social aspect of the subject, its nature, identity, and projects. The
autonomous individual of traditional liberalism is rejected as neither realistic,
nor desirable. At best there can be relational autonomy, and relational subjects,
because the self/​person/​agent is said to be constituted in relation.11 Social
embeddedness also indicates a developmental psychology, carrying explanatory
force. We are all products of social relationships, roles, and societal expectations.
Persons are made, not born; they are “second persons,” who have been “long
enough dependent on others to acquire the essential arts of personhood” (Baier
1985, 84). These essential arts are acquired and shaped by social forces, many of
them oppressive, due to stereotyped expectations about “what it is to be a female
person” (Code 1987, 362). This theorizing has particular force here because of
feminists’ persistent emphasis on the inadequacies of explanations of women’s
madness based on features that are inherently individualistic—​from the wan-
dering womb of hysteria and the hormones of postpartum depression, to chem-
ical imbalances, and epigenetic variations. Such idiopathic explanations must be
misleadingly incomplete, at least with disorders affecting the self/​person/​agent
(arguably, all disorders).
Feminist presuppositions about the embedded subject imply that the causal
explanation of mental disorders cannot be solely understood in terms of features
128 Self and Selves

internal and distinctive to the individual sufferer, even if that sufferer is an indis-
soluble composite of “mind” and “body.” For, in some quite real sense, the suf-
ferer is not an individual. A kind of methodological individualism is often taken
to at least dictate approaches to the treatment of disorder, if not to its nature. (The
appropriate unit for treatment may actually be the entire family system, rather
than the distressed individual within it, as some have thought.) And practical,
as well as societal, demands similarly require that persons be accorded enduring
and unitary identities (and held responsible accordingly, for example). But rather
than isolated individuals, all subjects, including disordered ones, have identities
embedded in the world of meanings, of shared, public, and interpersonal expe-
rience, and of social roles. For example, on a feminist analysis, the anorexia of a
particular teenager is explained as much in terms of societal beauty and virtue
norms and attitudes expressed by family and other institutions in her social
world as by her individual attributes and eating behavior (Bordo 1993; Giordano
2005). Any exclusive emphasis on her individual attributes will be misplaced and
misleading, providing an incomplete explanation of her disorder.
Given the nature of subjects, formed and constituted by their interpersonal,
societal, and cultural environments, we cannot be content with the idiopathic
causes of medico-​cognitivist analyses. Whatever the causal explanation in-
volved, it will be multifactorial, and complex. Feminists analyzing reductive
explanations in biology were early alert to this sort of critique, recognizing a ten-
dency to seek causes within the narrow system being studied, rather than the
broader systems or levels within which that system occurs and, as a consequence,
favoring genetic over environmental causes, including those that are social and
cultural. And successful scientific explanation, Carla Fehr has demonstrated, can
eschew the reduction of the objects of investigation to their smallest parts (Fehr
2004, 2008).
Medico-​cognitivist explanations often support their tendency toward reduc-
tionism through an assumption: whatever environmental triggers may arise,
every disorder’s root cause lies with some underlying, biological vulnerability—​
whether as a dysfunctional system or a genetic propensity or risk factor. These
presuppositions have been widely criticized, however, including by feminist
philosophers of science and genetics, pointing out the dubious link between a
particular genotype and its expression in a given phenotype (Fox Keller 2000;
Spanier 1995; Hubbard 1990; Fausto-​Sterling 1992). Such analyses emphasize
systematic bias allowing researchers to disregard the context in which a phe-
nomenon is found, and hence to value genetic and physiological over social
and environmental causal factors. The prevailing, mistaken presupposition
is methodologically individualistic: the critical causes of phenomena, toward
which intervention should be directed, are within a person and at the genetic
level (Scheman 1983, 1993; Fehr 2004). With regard to the connection between
 Symptoms in Particular 129

hormones and behavior so often cited in medico-​cognitivist explanations of

women’s mood-​related symptoms of depression and anxiety, a contrast has been
drawn between a linear-​hormonal model and one which is “interactionist.”
While not discounting genes or hormones, the interactionist model refuses to
privilege those factors over what may be thought of—​mistakenly—​as more su-
perficial, and secondary, environmental and social causes of behavior (Birke and
Vines 1987).
These criticisms apply whether we are speaking of reductionist appeal to ge-
netics, or to the reproductive phases of women’s bodies claimed to predestine
them to emotional and psychological vulnerability and madness. Today, the
causes of mental disorder are regularly cited as biological states of brain chem-
istry and neuronal function that are in turn reducible to genetic structures, even
though no single genes have thus far been identified for any particular mental
disorders, and the possibility of single-​gene discoveries seems increasingly re-
mote (Kendler 2013).
Genetic explanations of mental disorder have been subject to a range of meth-
odological objections.12 But important among them have been the distorting
effects of medicine’s exclusively idiopathic explanatory models, rejected by these
feminist critiques of biological reductionism. Thus, the same failure to recog-
nize a socially and culturally embedded subject has been echoed throughout
the social sciences, as well as within philosophical method derived from phe-
nomenological traditions. For example, recent work on mental disorder points
to interactions among systemic causes eluding reduction to bodily or individual
points of origin. In “ecosystemic” anthropological models, biological organisms
are in constant, multilevel transaction through feedback loops with the social
and cultural environment as much as with the physical one (Kirmeyer and Ryder
2016; Kirmeyer et al. 2016).
Feminist analyses of embedded subjects have seen no reason to single out
mental disorders from other illnesses and disorders, it should be noted, and
feminist bioethics has illustrated the way even conditions with entirely physical
symptoms are best understood as occurring within a context that encompasses
more than the afflicted body.13 Yet because the symptoms of mental disorder are
often problems exclusively affecting social roles and functioning, mental disorders
depend on “culturally constructed institutions and forms of life” to a degree that
may be seen to distinguish them (Kirmeyer et al. 2016, 6).
Added to the ecosystemic models of anthropology resting on many of the
presuppositions of feminist theorizing are several revisions proposed within
the philosophy of psychiatry.14 One construes disorder in network terms, chal-
lenging “common cause” analyses, by which each mental disorder comprises a
symptom cluster brought about by some particular, distinctive underlying brain
state on the model of bacterially caused diseases (Borsboom and Cramer 2013).
130 Self and Selves

Within a network, internal causal relationships between separate symptoms

can determine the characteristic profile of the disorder. Symptoms in the net-
work form a self-​sustaining, mutually reinforcing, relatively stable cluster, so that
symptoms (of mood, thought, and habit) are indications of disorder when, be-
cause, and to the extent that the connected links and loops occur often enough to
become entrenched (Kendler et al. 2011, 1147).
These recent findings and hypotheses from social science and contempo-
rary philosophy of psychiatry direct us toward the observable manifestations
of disorder—​toward symptoms in particular. If, rather than understood as un-
derlying, idiopathic dysfunction, mental disorders are collections of socially
embedded, mutually reinforcing signs and symptoms sufficient to maintain
clusters of traits in given individuals, and are the product of environment and
social context as much as or more than any inherent common causes, then signs
and symptoms call for further scrutiny. And that scrutiny invites application of
feminist ideas about situated knowledge and epistemic injustice.

Symptoms, Ontology, and Epistemic Justice

Signs and symptoms form a major part of the available data for any model
of mental disorder. As such, they are the diagnostic identities of such
disorders: without independent verification and confirmation of the kind pro-
vided by the lab tests and scans employed elsewhere in medicine, signs and
symptoms cannot be dispensed with for decisions about treatment and care.
But as long as these observable indicators are construed as no more than down-
stream effects, theoretical attention to them will be limited and reluctant. Any
expectation that organic causes of such effects will eventually be discovered
leaves signs and symptoms somewhat stopgap, and perhaps temporary, features,
suggesting that were lab tests or scans available, the patient’s voiced complaint
may be otiose. In the anthropological and network analyses described above, by
contrast, symptoms descriptions offered by patients possess a different epistemic
significance, apparently according mental disorder a different ontological status.
Its signs and symptoms will not only be the disorder’s diagnostic identity, but
may be constitutive of it.
Whatever biology, neurology, or genetics might explain the phenomenon, and
regardless of the bodily state of the individual, their subjective, discomforting,
felt aspects of some conditions, such as depression and anxiety, are essential
features. The subjective experience of distress and the extent of impairment of a
person’s day-​to-​day functioning are intrinsic properties of depression: conceptu-
ally, attributions of depression are made on the basis of “consequences of the syn-
drome as they manifest to the subject” (Rashed and Bingham 2014, 245). (How
 Symptoms in Particular 131

well the account applies to disorders with primarily behavioral symptoms such
as addictions remains to be determined.)15 A disorder’s psychological symptoms
may be inherent and constitutive, even if caused by biological or social factors—​
if not forever then at least as long as everyday and clinical intuitions concur over
this status (Summers and Sinnott-​Armstrong 2019).
Traditionally understood in medicine, the sign is observable by others or by
instruments; the symptom is the complaint or report proffered by the patient in her
own voice.16 Although regularly disregarded in present-​day medical and non-
medical writing, this distinction between sign and symptom must be pertinent
for feminist thought, with its stress on hearing the voices of the socially mar-
ginalized.17 These voices provide an otherwise missing perspective necessary for
complete, situated knowledge (Harding 2004). But it is not only in achieving sit-
uated knowledge that voiced symptoms are important; they also lie at the center
of normative claims. Thus, in several different ways people’s attempted testimony
is silenced and violated when they speak from positions of societal oppression,
it has been emphasized (Dotson 2011). Miranda Fricker writes about epistemic
marginalization of individuals or groups whose experiences are ignored as un-
intelligible, or are misunderstood; in their exclusion from practices of meaning-​
making, they are the subjects of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007).
This kind of epistemic injustice will affect the status of women patients
recounting their symptoms.18 Their words must be vulnerable to epistemic
injustices such as Fricker and Dotson describe, even if, as we saw earlier, more
sensitive listening occurs in the clinic than in many other places, and a finer-​
grained analysis recognizes the relative privilege enjoyed by some, such as the
white, middle-​class woman patient with secure citizenship, speaking in her na-
tive tongue (Code 1993; Garry 2011). The position of all women, as patients in
the clinic as well as outside it, leaves their words vulnerable to dismissal, disre-
gard, and misunderstanding.
Gender aside, every person diagnosed with and treated for mental disorder
is subject to a heightened and distinctive form of epistemic jeopardy. Much of
this jeopardy is attributable to stigmatizing attitudes. But also, these symptom
descriptions contain an inherent ambiguity: cognitive disabilities involving com-
prehension, intelligibility, and reasoning—​sometimes actually present—​affect
the status of all psychiatric patients as trustworthy and reliable narrators. Real
or only, and mistakenly, suspected, and regardless of diagnosis, these attitudes
leave the patient’s account of her symptoms additionally vulnerable to misunder-
standing, neglect, and injustice.
Voiced symptom descriptions viewed as testimony represent one form of such
potential epistemic injustice. Any testimony must meet certain communicative
norms. Cognitive disabilities, when in fact present, warrant some appropriately
grounded expectations and doubts on the part of the listener. But these will be fused
132 Self and Selves

with what is likely stereotype-​based biases predisposing observers to attribute lack

of testimonial credibility. Thus, a recent attempt to consider delusional communi-
cations in light of Fricker’s work points to three distinct ways in which epistemic
injustice occurs: (1) the label “delusion” added to other factors may detract from the
credibility accorded to the delusional claim (whether or not the labeling is accurate);
(2) an independent attitude about the person’s social undesirability will attribute de-
lusional thought and irrationality when it is not present; and (3) impaired linguistic
and communicative skills may lead to the unwarranted attribution of unintelligi-
bility (Sanati and Kratsous 2015). Far-​fetched assertions (“My husband meets with
witches,” or “I am 250 years of age”) are examples, or the patently incomprehensible
“word salads” and neologisms of formal thought disorder. These may be justifiably
judged to lack testimonial competence, or deserved credibility.
Defined by Kristie Dotson, testimonial competence is “accurate intelligi-
bility” and assertions that are “clearly comprehensible and defeasibly intelligible”
(Dotson 2011, 245). Yet even restricting ourselves to syntactically acceptable
statements that are intelligible, when and whether the patient’s words indicate
testimonial incompetence in being delusional, calls for conclusive, consensually
agreed-​upon analysis.
It is difficult to exaggerate this problem. The line between irrational claims and
delusional ones is without precise boundaries (Bortolotti 2010; Radden 2011;
Sanati and Kratsous 2015). In addition, the nature of delusions is itself contested.
To cite only the most divergent hypotheses, one account allows some delusions
at least to be meaningful, if obscure, communications, while on other accounts
they are meaningless thought fragments, expressed through misleadingly unex-
ceptional syntax.19
That close attention and clinical skill allow effective practitioners to regu-
larly hear and understand the voices of patients is again worth acknowledging.
But avoiding mistakes over testimonial competence ignores the more funda-
mental challenge raised by discordant hypotheses about the nature of delusional
thought processes, which must affect the voices of all those suspected of mental
disorder. We can illustrate this challenge using the common failure of many
patients to acknowledge their condition as illness or dysfunction (their “lack of
insight into illness,” in the terminology of psychiatry). Some experts regard the
patient’s “There’s nothing wrong with me” as an erroneous claim that, sharing a
spectrum with self-​deception and other forms of motivated irrationality, is po-
tentially open to revision. Others analogize it to anosognosia, an indicator of
neurological damage (Radden 2010).20 On the first interpretation, the subject
remains within the “space of reasons”: it acknowledges the patient’s potential as
a knower capable of some agency in relation to her thought processes, some de-
gree of reasons-​responsiveness such that correction of the false or implausible
opinion is allied to forms of rational persuasion employed with other instances
 Symptoms in Particular 133

of stubbornly maintained erroneous beliefs. Interpreted as anosognosia, by

contrast—​its proximate cause inner brain dysfunction—​the patient’s denial that
she is ill leaves her as powerless to alter her erroneous convictions as she would
be to at will directly alter her abnormal white cell count. Despite its misleading
resemblance to more meaningful communications, her lack of insight on this
view may be a sign, but it is not a symptom, of her disorder.
Problems thus remain. When and whether testimonial competence is present
lies at the center of efforts to understand and give these symptom descriptions
their due, as demanded by feminist approaches. If delusional reports are not
actual symptoms, but merely signs, they will not exhibit the testimonial com-
petence that is a precondition for vulnerability to the particular forms of epi-
stemic injustice involving testimony. Without agreement over which voiced
descriptions are actual symptoms, these normative assessments about justice
cannot be made with any assurance. Moreover, as Eleanor Byrne has recognized,
this may not be an all-​or-​nothing matter, and will likely require striking a bal-
ance between epistemic injustice and healthcare (Byrne 2020).

In conclusion: the kind of multicausal, interactionist explanatory analysis of

mental disorder that can be traced to feminist theorizing is increasingly accepted
today across the social sciences and philosophy. It is even acknowledged within
psychiatry, network analyses illustrate, and in cognitivist theories of embodied
and enactive cognition. Its increasing recognition confirms the force and via-
bility of the feminist theorizing of the 1980s and 1990s.
These revisions were here shown to draw attention to a revised status for psy-
chiatric symptoms. Rather than downstream effects of disorder, symptoms con-
strued as the voiced descriptions of the patient’s experience not only form the
diagnostic identity of (at least some) disorders, they may be constitutive of the
condition with which they are associated. As such, they are an important target
of feminism’s alertness to testimonial injustice. A revised conception of the self/​
person/​agent may have allowed us to forge more appropriate explanatory models
than those offered by medico-​cognitivist paradigms. Still, the subject afflicted
with mental disorder (or diagnosis) leaves us with remaining concerns, both epi-
stemic and ethical, over women’s mental disorders.

Notes

1. “Mental disorder” is used here to refer to responses judged apt for psychiatric diag-
nosis and care; “disordered mind” is attributed to the subject of those responses.
2. See Boorse (1975), Guze (1992), Murphy (2007).
3. Cohen and Timini (2008) is an example.
134 Self and Selves

4. This departure from classical cognitivist assumptions and analogies returns us to the
phenomenological work of thinkers such as Parnas and Sass (2008), Drayson (2009),
Gallagher (2011), Stenghellini (2014), and Maiese (2016).
5. See essays in Garry and Pearsall (1996) and Antony and Witt (1993).
6. See Mitchell (1975), Meyers (1994, 1997), Gilbert and Gubar (1980), Bondi and
Burman (2001), and Kristeva (1980, 1995).
7. Lugones, in this volume, illustrates the latter.
8. Essays in Antony and Witt (1993) and Atkins and Mackenzie (2010) are illustra-
tive here.
9. As a requirement for the sense of self, embodied consciousness has recently been
explored in relation to particular mental disturbances (Maiese 2016).
10. For more recent accounts of autonomy that acknowledge its intersecting social
determinants, see Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000).
11. See Whitbeck (1992), Frye (1996), Ferguson (1996), Garry and Pearsall (1996), and
Bayliss (2011).
12. Examples include Murphy and Stich (2000), Bolton (2008), and Varga (2012).
13. See, for example, Wolf (1996).
14. For a recent review, see Köhne (2020).
15. Depression and anxiety are the only disorders consistently shown to have higher in-
cidence in women, so even if this analysis extends no farther, its significance for fem-
inism is notable.
16. See King (1968).
17. Hearing includes an active role—​providing “uptake” to the speaker (Potter 2003).
18. A more complete account would also include hermeneutical forms of epistemic in-
justice not dealt with here, but see Sanati and Kratsous (2015).
19. For these and other hypotheses, see Bortolotti (2010), Radden (2011), and Gerrans
(2014).
20. See Amador and David (1998), Reimer (2010), Radden (2011), and Sanati and
Kratsous (2015).

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 7
Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self
Reflections on the Views of Soran Reader and Sarah Buss
Diana Tietjens Meyers

Reclaiming and revaluing features of human lives that have been ignored or
devalued in traditional philosophy are among the prime projects of recent fem-
inist philosophy.1 By and large, this corrective trend proceeds by spotlighting
ostensibly feminine attributes, questioning whether they deserve the ne-
glect or disparagement they’ve received, and arguing that their value has been
overlooked at least partly because of their association with femininity. Following
on these lines of thought, feminist philosophers have moved to integrate these
reclaimed values into philosophical conversations, and to show how including
these values in our treatments of various topics enriches our understanding of
them or obliges us to radically reframe them.
The best-​known example of this reclamation and revaluation project is the
centering of care work in moral and political philosophy. However, another rec-
lamation and revaluation project is underway in discussions of emotion and au-
tonomy. Feminist philosophers have been rethinking the interrelated contrasts
between activity and passivity, on the one hand, and agency and vulnerability,
on the other. Anticipating work in the philosophy of action, Martha Nussbaum
argues for emotion’s function as a gauge of value and its inextricability from
neediness and vulnerability. Discomfort with the unavoidable neediness and vul-
nerability of human lives, she insists, does not excuse disregarding the vital role
that emotion plays in alerting us to all sorts of goodness and badness (Nussbaum
2001, 11–​13). In a similar vein, some philosophers of self and action, notably
Soran Reader (2007) and Sarah Buss (2012), join Nussbaum in decrying the sup-
position that activity and passivity are separable and that agency and control are
more essentially human than vulnerability and helplessness.
Today the gendered connotations of these dichotomies are obvious. Women
are supposedly dependent, vulnerable, and passive, men supposedly inde-
pendent, strong, and active. The evident falsity of these stereotypes gives
feminists compelling reason to critique them. So it might come as a surprise that
forty years ago Harry Frankfurt tabled the active/​passive contrast as all but im-
possible to cogently explicate and proceeded to build his influential theory of

Diana Tietjens Meyers, Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0008
140 Self and Selves

agentic selfhood on the related but different distinction between internality and
externality (Frankfurt 1998, 58–​59). Although my views about the agentic self
differ from his, I’m sure he was right to set aside the active/​passive dichotomy and
seek out alternative conceptual resources for theorizing autonomous subjects.
In keeping with this conviction, I am skeptical of current philosophical efforts
to celebrate or otherwise salvage the reputation of passivity and vulnerability.
I do not deny that vulnerability is a necessary consequence of our biological and
psychosocial existence. Nor do I deny that it is a necessary concomitant of human
agency or that human mastery is necessarily constrained. To deny these realities
would be daft, and to denigrate them would be to denigrate the human condi-
tion. But, as I’ll argue, Reader and Buss fasten so tenaciously on the ostensibly
passive side of selfhood and agency that their views miss core features of human
life. Not only are their conceptions of selfhood and agency distorted, but also
their accounts misrepresent victims of wrongful, humanly inflicted suffering.
This chapter has two main parts. The first argues that Reader’s contention
that passivity is a necessary concomitant of activity and agency mistakes inter-
activity for passivity and falls into complicity with a malign stereotype of victims
that relegates them to passivity and that prejudices their claims for justice. The
second part takes up Buss’s claim that autonomy is not premised on a special
type of activity but rather on a special type of passivity. I argue that her account
of autonomy overlooks the ways in which agentic subjects must exercise capaci-
ties in order to sustain minimal flourishing and that these oversights result in an
unsatisfactory treatment of autonomy under oppression. Passivity is neither a
feminine attribute that deserves reclamation nor a ground for accounts of vic-
timhood that feminists should endorse.
The activity/​passivity binary distracts Reader and Buss from key details con-
cerning the phenomena they endeavor to analyze. As a result, they see passivity
where I see various forms of interactivity and capacitation.2 When I speak of
interactivity, I mean to reference a wide variety of types of engagement with a
person’s social and material environment. Enculturation is a form of interactivity
that takes place to a large extent at the subconscious level and relies partly on
inborn mimetic capacities. Conversation is a form of interactivity that involves
relatively effortless, localized overt movement but a lot of subpersonal interpre-
tative processing and linguistic know-​how. Playing tennis is a high-​octane form
of interactivity that requires extensive training and embodied skill. All forms of
interactivity depend on corresponding forms of capacitation. Some, such as the
mimetic and interpretative capacities mentioned above, can operate automati-
cally without the agent’s awareness. Others, such as talking or serving in a game
of tennis, the agent deliberately mobilizes to respond to circumstances and take
advantage of opportunities.
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 141

The target of my criticism in this chapter is passivity—​a state in which one

is controlled by external force, inert and uninvolved, or disposed to submit to
another’s will.3 I’ll argue that theories of the agentic self and autonomy would
profit from jettisoning talk of passivity and replacing it with talk of interactivity
and capacitation. Framing these topics in terms of interactivity and capacitation
would underwrite a better understanding of what it is to be a victim and why it is
possible for victims to be agents.

Reader’s Reclamation of Passivity

Reader deplores the “agential bias” she detects in philosophical accounts of per-
sonhood (Reader 2007, 580). What she means is that philosophers err in ex-
cluding the “abject features of human life” from their understandings of personal
identity and selfhood (Reader 2007, 579). In her view, suffering, weakness, vul-
nerability, constraint, and dependency are species of passivity and they are no
less constitutive of who you are than acting, power, control, freedom, and inde-
pendence. I grant that something like an agential bias distorts some philosoph-
ical accounts of the self and personal identity. However, I disagree that an agential
bias is as prevalent as Reader believes it is, and I disagree that elevating the status
of passivity or “patiency” is a viable remedy for whatever agential bias exists. My
reasons for opposing Reader’s strategy derive in part from the concerns we share
about the objectification and denigration of victims of oppression and human
rights abuse. Before I take up that issue, however, I need to raise some questions
(1) about Reader’s charge that an agentic bias skews philosophical theories of the
person and (2) about her account of the role of patiency in the lives of persons.
Philosophical reflection on the relationships between agency and one kind
of “patiency”—​namely, vulnerability—​dates back as far as ancient Greece. In
acting for a reason, you risk misjudging what action best expresses your moti-
vation, and you risk falling short of achieving your purpose. Thus you are vul-
nerable to failure—​what Aristotle calls missing the mark (Nicomachean Ethics
1106b29–​33). Another form of vulnerability is central to the liberal tradition of
rights-​based political theory as well as to contemporary human rights theory.
Rights-​bearers are individuals who are entitled to act as they choose within the
bounds of their rights, but who are vulnerable to others’ aggression or refusal
to lend a hand. If their rightful agency is to be secured, institutionalized rights
must protect their vulnerabilities. A number of contemporary philosophers of
action focus attention on a third form of agentic vulnerability, namely, vulner-
ability to hostile social environments that prevent you from acquiring sufficient
proficiency, self-​regard, or psychological freedom to act autonomously.4
142 Self and Selves

Conceptualizing the agentic subject as vulnerable is not new or philosophi-

cally peripheral. However, because these acknowledgments of agentic vulnera-
bility treat vulnerabilities as hindrances to be overcome, and because they stop
short of associating vulnerability with passivity, Reader might respond that they
are infected with agential bias. I’ll argue, however, that her arguments for intro-
ducing passivity into our conception of personhood are flawed.

Personhood as Patiency?

According to Reader, passivity is “necessarily presupposed by the ‘positive’ agen-

tial features”—​action, capability, freedom, choice, rationality, and independence
(Reader 2007, 588). Regarding action, Reader contends that all “doings involve
sufferings,” that “actions always have patients” (Reader 2007, 588). Her point
seems to be that whenever you act, you affect someone or something else and
in some small or large way yourself as well. This is true, yet it’s not perspicuous
to label all the ways in which persons can be affected “suffering” and to subsume
suffering under the category of passivity. It is more apt to say that agents are re-
ceptive and responsive to neutral or positive stimuli, whereas they suffer and
endure necessary pain and serious maltreatment. In either case, the concept of
interactivity best captures the normal modality of agentic subjects.
When other people act in ways that harmlessly or beneficially affect you or
that impose relatively mild or manageable types of harm on you, you experi-
ence these encounters. Far from passively undergoing what others do to you,
you interact with them and process their inputs in myriad ways. Because your
existing intellectual, affective, motivational, and valuational systems selec-
tively assimilate or repudiate inputs, often modifying those inputs along the
way, one upshot of this lifelong interactivity is the formation and refinement of
your personal identity—​the attributes that characterize you as a unique indi-
vidual. Interactivity typifies most social experience. Since you do not passively
suffer the effects of others’ tolerably decent conduct,5 it’s misleading to main-
tain that activity can only take place in tandem with passivity. Later, I’ll argue
that it’s also misleading to maintain that people necessarily suffer and endure
severe abuse passively.
Reader regards incapacity as another neglected species of patiency (Reader
2007, 589). No one is endowed with every possible capability. So, possessing
a particular set of capacities entails lacking others (Reader 2007, 589–​590).
Obviously she’s right about this, but incapacities aren’t a species of passivity.
Although lacking a capacity entails not acting in arenas that expressly require
it, lacking a capacity doesn’t entail inertness or submission—​that is, passivity.
Spectating might be an option when participating isn’t. Indeed, unless someone’s
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 143

incapacities interfere with living a satisfying life, philosophers typically celebrate

the unique combinations of capacities and incapacities that characterize distinc-
tive individual identities. Far from manifesting an agential bias by lamenting our
incapacities, philosophers argue that we adapt to them through mutually benefi-
cial social cooperation and coordination.
Reader might concede that incapacities are not a type of passivity, but she
would reply that incapacities are not the only liabilities with which capabilities are
conjoined. By exercising your capabilities in the service of malevolent purposes,
for instance, you become vulnerable to charges of wrongdoing (Reader 2007,
590). I agree, but you may also exercise your capabilities in an exemplary manner
in pursuit of lofty goals. In that case, it would be exceedingly odd to say that
you become vulnerable to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize or some other award.
That’s because responsibility, whether for good or bad conduct, is not a species
of passivity, nor is it a liability of agency. Taking responsibility and owning your
actions are plainly forms of interactivity. That norms of engagement with others
govern standing accused of wrongdoing as well as accepting credit or praise for
meritorious conduct implies that these too are forms of interactivity.
Moreover, Margaret Walker points out that being accountable to others and
having standing to call others to account signals full membership in a moral
community (Walker 2014, 119). Although it follows that persons are “morally
vulnerable” to powerful wrongdoers who may refuse to heed victims’ accusations
and demands for justice, Walker’s call for reparations that affirm victims’ status
as full members of the moral community is not rooted in a noxious agential
bias, but rather in a widely and properly shared understanding of the dignity of
persons. Being deprived of this status is a grave sort of harm, a “moral wound”
(Walker 2014, 120). Your dignity as a person rests on your entitlement to interact
with others.
Reader holds that the passive side of freedom, choice, and rationality is con-
straint, necessity, and contingency. Your options are not unlimited; you don’t
always have more than one feasible choice; your deliberations aren’t foolproof
(Reader 2007, 590). Likewise, your independence is conditional on countless
dependencies—​including health, access to oxygen, nutrition, potable water, edu-
cation, employment, and so on (Reader 2007, 591). To be sure, but locating these
constraints, necessities, contingencies, and dependencies on the passive side of
agency misses their significance for agentic subjects.
The situatedness of agentic subjects in a world that does not let them have eve-
rything they might want, including more complete knowledge of the contexts
in which they must act, and in which they must rely on a vast array of social and
material supports doesn’t render them passive. On the contrary, this situatedness
endlessly furnishes occasions for various kinds of interactivity. Indeed, it is be-
cause agentic subjects can make do with the givens of their lives and make use of
144 Self and Selves

the resources that they have at their disposal, that they are intelligent agents—​not
gods, not automatons.
It seems to me that what Reader is doing is cataloging the circumstances of re-
spect for persons—​that is, the ordinary conditions in which autonomous choice
and action are possible and necessary. In framing my suggestion this way, I mean
to allude to what John Rawls calls the circumstances of justice—​the “normal
conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary”
(Rawls 1971, 126). These circumstances aren’t the positives and negatives of jus-
tice. They are the conditions that must obtain for instituting a system of justice to
make sense as a desirable and practicable basis for social organization. Similarly,
if we understand the imperfect workings of agentic subjects and the challenging
contexts in which they must choose and act as preconditions for practices of re-
spect for persons to make sense, the various dimensions of agency that Reader
consigns to the realm of passivity are excellent candidates for inclusion in the
circumstances of respect for persons.
Agentic subjects are equipped with limited epistemic, imaginative, and vo-
litional powers and they inhabit complicated social, natural, and artifactual
worlds. It is because of what they can accomplish despite the constraints and
imponderables they face that respecting them is a desirable and practicable basis
for interpersonal relations.

Protecting Victims by Revaluing Passivity?

One reason Reader advocates putting patiency on a par with agency is that she
thinks that redeeming human patiency will rescue victims from objectification
and scorn (Reader 2007, 595). Yet, real victims, whether female or male, don’t al-
ways, even usually, fit the stereotype of victims as helpless, passive targets. If you
need to be reduced to helplessness and passivity to count as a victim, Reader’s rec-
lamation strategy would exclude many victims of undeniably grievous wrongs.
Although Reader cites Susan Brison’s groundbreaking book Aftermath,
Brison’s recounting of the sexual assault and attempted murder she survived
does not support Reader’s position. Far from collapsing into helpless passivity
during the attack, she figures out her predicament, tries strategies of submis-
sion and fighting back, tells her assailant that she’ll protect him by saying she’d
been hit by a car, tells him he’ll be punished more severely if he kills her, and fi-
nally plays dead to make him leave (Brison 2002, 88–​89).6 Like countless other
victims, Brison was not reduced to an object except in the misogynistic fantasy
life of her rapist and would-​be killer.
I don’t deny that villains sometimes succeed in reducing agentic subjects to
helpless passivity. Some sexual assault victims freeze. Making a split-​second
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 145

judgment that neither defending yourself nor fleeing from your attacker will
succeed, you seize up and dissociate from the abuse being inflicted on you.7
Arguably, the freeze response is adaptive in situations in which you have no
chance of fighting off or escaping from a grave threat, for freezing reduces your
awareness of the fear and pain you are suffering. Yet, it seems to me that a dis-
tinctive kind of opprobrium attaches to crimes that de-​agentify their victims.
Consequently, valorizing a psychological mechanism designed to cope with such
horrific attacks strikes me as defeatist, if not cynical.8
I agree with Reader that the “personal perspective of victims” is indispensable
to theorizing the agentic subject (Reader 2007, 597). Although that perspective
does entail respecting victims who freeze in the face of danger, it doesn’t entail
honoring passivity and inserting it into our concept of an agentic subject. Rather
it entails that philosophers need to theorize how best to protect people from such
egregious wrongs—​what cultural and institutional measures would curtail them.
Reader’s discussion of “enduring” violence indicates how she might rebut my
view. She maintains that enduring violence is not action, does not show positive
capability, is not chosen, and is not independent, but that it is difficult and cou-
rageous (Reader 2007, 597). Although you are passive, you are “fully present and
alive” (Reader 2007, 598).9 Thus she concludes that it’s a mistake to think that
undergoing harm “is somehow less personal, less expressive and determinative
of me, than what I do of free rational choice” (Reader 2007, 600). I’m sure she’s
right to bind who you are to what you have been through, but not because pas-
sivity is inextricable from activity and hence constitutive of personal identity.
Enduring pain is not the same as going limp or numbing out. To endure pain,
you must gird yourself to withstand what you are undergoing. What may appear
to be passive submission from the outside is anything but from the perspective
of the victim. The examples Reader invokes from Veena Das’s work support this
claim. In her studies of the survival strategies of Indian women from minority
religious communities who had been subjected to multiple forms of violence,
Das reports that some women spoke of “drinking all the pain” and “digesting the
poison” (quoted in Reader 2007, 598). Reader comments that these women are
enduring trauma by “metabolizing, neutralizing, containing, and living with it
so that human life can continue” (Reader 2007, 598). Although their method of
coping is obviously different from speaking out, accusing the perpetrators, and
demanding that they be punished, it is certainly not passive.10 Although it may
not look as if they are doing anything, they are in fact inwardly contending with
what they have been through.
Valuing patiency as much as agency finds passivity where it doesn’t exist while
eclipsing the agency of innumerable victims. In so doing, it disrespects them in-
stead of securing their dignity. To spare victims the humiliation and marginal-
ization they are commonly subjected to, we must critique the stereotype of the
146 Self and Selves

passive victim and promulgate a conception of victimhood that allows victims to

be agents without sacrificing their standing as victims and their claim to redress
(Meyers 2016).

Buss’s Reclamation of Passivity

Buss also revalues passivity but in a different register. Whereas Reader claims
that passivity is no less constitutive of personal identity and agentic selfhood than
activity, Buss claims that a particular form of passivity is constitutive of char-
acter and personality and hence of autonomous action. Like Reader, Buss takes
victims into account. However, Reader seeks to free victims from misplaced con-
tempt and blame, whereas Buss seeks to explain how oppression compromises
victims’ agency. In order to understand Buss’s treatment of victims, I first need to
sketch her account of autonomy.
For Buss, autonomous action is action for which the agent is responsible
(Buss 2012, 648). Thus she undertakes to explain what it is about an agent’s par-
ticipation in generating an action that confers responsibility. After rejecting
explanations that rely on things that agents do, such as deliberating, identifying,
or endorsing, Buss maintains that the role of the agentic subject in autonomous
action cannot be an active one and must be a passive one. Autonomous action
must be “self-​determination in the passive mode” (Buss 2012, 657).

Autonomy in the Passive Mode?

According to Buss, “The distinguishing characteristic of autonomous action is

that the agent forms her intention under the causal, nonrational influence of
the person she is insofar as, in her agential capacity, she is a representative of her
species” (Buss 2012, 680; emphasis added). Assuming, as is customary, that au-
tonomy is self-​governance, Buss unpacks this definition by furnishing an anal-
ysis of the self of self-​governance or agentic self. Her account has two prongs: (1)
a conception of an agent’s practical identity—​the “character condition,” and (2) a
normative constraint on the content of a representative of the human species’
practical identity—​the “human flourishing condition” (Buss 2012, 657–​659).
Together, these requirements clarify the sense in which autonomous action is a
“more complete expression of the agent herself ” (Buss 2012, 657).
To satisfy the character condition, an agentic subject must have a set of psy-
chological traits that defines her character and personality—​“the person she
is” (Buss 2012, 658). These dispositions shape what an agent notices, how she
interprets the information she gathers, and what she cares about. In turn they
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 147

influence the formation of her value system, her interpersonal relationships, and
her personal projects (Buss 2012, 657–​658). Because these dispositions must
be understood as purely causal, nonrational influences on an agentic subject’s
decision-​making and intention-​forming processes, the agentic subject is passive
in relation to them (Buss 2012, 658). But such passivity is no obstacle to agency.
On the contrary, when these psychological dispositions can properly be said to
define who an individual is, and when they bring about her actions, her actions
express her practical identity and are therefore autonomous.
Some possible sets of psychological dispositions cannot properly be said to
define who an individual is and are therefore incompatible with autonomous
agency. Sets that do not satisfy the human flourishing condition do not consti-
tute agentic subjects—​subjects who are capable of autonomous action.
Buss sets the bar for satisfying this condition at minimal flourishing, and she
fleshes out this criterion negatively and positively. States of affairs that defeat the
human flourishing condition bespeak pathology or induce pathology. They in-
clude being in extreme pain or fear; not having access to adequate and secure
nutrition; being out of touch with reality; being cut off from positive sensations;
and being constantly distracted (Buss 2012, 671, 673).11 Such conditions thwart
autonomy. Capacities that are conducive to meeting the human flourishing con-
dition include being able to take care of yourself; being able to avoid serious legal
troubles; and being able to maintain friendships (Buss 2012, 676). Whereas exer-
cising these capacities promotes minimal flourishing and ensures autonomy,
acting so as to undermine them precludes autonomy. Summing up her view,
Buss observes, “A trait is disabling in the sense relevant to our assessment of au-
tonomous agency if, when it is a stable disposition, it typically prevents members
of the agent’s species from satisfying one or more of their basic needs without
exceptional effort” (Buss 2012, 672).
The human flourishing condition is crucial for autonomy in two respects. First,
it determines whether or not an individual’s settled psychological dispositions
constitute an agentic self, a self that is representative of the human species and
therefore capable of autonomous action (Buss 2012, 660). Second, when a psy-
chological or physiological state motivates action that does not comport with an
agent’s settled psychological dispositions but that does comport with the human
flourishing condition, her action is nevertheless autonomous (Buss 2012, 659).
Buss delineates two tiers of autonomy. On the principal tier, the agent’s prac-
tical identity drives action, and the agentic subject is passive with respect to the
dispositions that comprise her practical identity. This level takes seriously the
familiar idea that autonomous agents are unique individuals whose autonomous
actions express their unique identities. On the auxiliary tier, a motivation that
all humans ought to have can give rise to conduct that is contrary to a partic-
ular individual’s practical identity, yet autonomous. This backup conception is a
148 Self and Selves

sensible concession to the tensions within multidimensional practical identities;

to the likelihood that no one’s practical identity is well equipped to cope with
every turn of events; and to the value of spontaneity. Here, the agentic subject’s
passivity in being governed by the disposition to sustain minimal flourishing
comes to the fore. Freezing in response to an inescapable sexual assault would
qualify as autonomous, it seems, provided that it reduced immediate suffering
and subsequently conduced to minimal flourishing.
Recapping, Buss’s passivity theory holds that agentic subjects needn’t do an-
ything to validate, own, or internalize their desires (Buss 2012, 678). All that
matters is how a person’s actions are caused. Actions that are caused by settled
dispositions that promote minimal flourishing or by an inborn disposition to
pursue minimal flourishing are autonomous. In my judgment, however, labeling
this account “autonomy in the passive mode” is misleading. Against her conten-
tion that she is advocating a passivity account, I argue that she is presenting an
interactive capacitation account and that the sense in which this type of account
is passive is trivial.
Let’s start with her character condition. It’s clear that, for Buss, your prac-
tical identity serves as an interpretative system and as a motivational system.
Since I’ve already argued that motivations aren’t passively acquired, I’ll now
focus on the interpretative side. Like consolidating practical dispositions and
commitments, construing situations is a type of interactivity. Your interpretative
capacities strive to grasp what’s going on, how it matters to you, and what options
for action are available to you. Your circumstances do not impress a ready-​made
understanding on you as if your mind was a lump of wet clay. Rather, you must
construct an understanding of your circumstances as Brison did when she came
under attack.
Buss might respond that your interpretative system—​ your conceptual
templates, inferential moves, affective feedback loops, and interactive gambits—​
functions causally to generate understandings of situations. But because cau-
sation plays a role in everything that happens at the macro level, it would be
question-​begging to infer that everything happens passively, for that inference
would define activity out of existence by fiat. Worse, adopting this position would
result in overlooking the intricacies, not to mention the vitality, of agentic selves.
Now consider the human flourishing condition. Buss identifies three cap-
acities that contribute to satisfying this condition: (1) the capacity to care for
yourself, (2) the capacity to stay out of trouble, and (3) the capacity to maintain
friendships. Plainly these capacities are types of capacitation, and availing your-
self of these capacities entails quite a lot of interactivity—​noticing and acquiring
needed goods and aid, noticing and avoiding potential dangers, and noticing
associates’ sensitivities and needs and considerately responding to them. This
need for interactivity is hardly surprising because you can’t maintain your health
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 149

as a representative member of the human species passively. If Buss were to reply

that the capacities that enable you to accomplish these aims operate causally
cranking out health-​preserving conduct, I would repeat that she is trivializing
her affirmation of passivity by rendering it tautologous. In doing so, moreover,
she would fail to capture the complex workings of agentic selves.
Buss’s analysis of serious psychopathology’s disastrous effects on autonomy
implicitly supports my contention that hers is a capacitation account that requires
much more interactivity than she acknowledges. Unlike agentic subjects, ac-
cording to Buss, individuals afflicted by autonomy-​disabling psychopathologies
experience passivity intensely.12 Although healthy agentic subjects are no less
passive than unhealthy nonagentic subjects, healthy agentic subjects aren’t aware
of their passivity but unhealthy nonagentic subjects are acutely aware of theirs
(Buss 2012, 684). This phenomenological difference together with the experi-
ence of mental disintegration that commonly accompanies psychopathology ac-
counts for much of the suffering that victims of severe psychopathologies endure
(Buss 2012, 685). Yet, according to Buss, their passivity isn’t the problem, it’s their
suffering that’s bad (Buss 2012, 684).
This strikes me as a very peculiar claim. As I argued a moment ago, there’s
a lot more capacitation and interactivity underwriting Buss’s account of au-
tonomy than she admits. If this is right, it’s arguable that agentic subjects don’t
feel passive because they really aren’t all that passive. In addition, as I argued in
my discussion of Reader, we use the term “suffering” to signal that something
bad is happening to someone and making her miserable. Thus, the grammar of
suffering links suffering to the various harms that can befall sentient beings. If
so, experiencing passivity because of grave mental illness causes suffering be-
cause passivity is bad for agentic subjects. If passivity really were as healthy and
harmless as Buss makes it out to be, it wouldn’t make sense that being aware
of it would cause you to suffer. Buss might answer that agentic subjects are
oblivious to their passivity—​perhaps because they are endowed with a congen-
ital illusion that they’re exerting control over their conduct; perhaps because
they are minimally flourishing and feel pretty good.13 But if I’m right about all
the capacitation and interactivity her passivity account conceals, this reply is
irrelevant.

“Passive Autonomy” for Victims of Oppression?

In addition to victims of psychopathology, Buss considers victims of oppression.

Many philosophers and activists contend that oppression adversely affects au-
tonomy, and Buss offers an explanation of when oppression blocks autonomy
and when it does not.
150 Self and Selves

She approaches this problem by asking whether attributes instilled by a sexist

upbringing—​such as, a woman’s self-​inhibiting, subordination-​perpetuating
dispositions—​should count as constitutive of her agentic self. Here’s her answer:

The issue is whether what is in her is internal to her identity as a representative

human being—​or whether, alternatively, it is an affliction or deformity of the
psyche. (Buss 2012, 689)

Deciding this matter depends on whether or not the oppressed woman’s char-
acter and personality traits obstruct minimal flourishing.14 If they do, she is not a
representative human being, and her actions are not autonomous. If they do not,
she is autonomously embarked on the life prescribed for her by oppressive social
norms and structures. This position is troubling in several ways.
First, Buss pegs minimal flourishing to being able to satisfy your basic needs
without exceptional effort (Buss 2012, 672). But there’s heated controversy about
basic needs. Some philosophers maintain that a person’s basic needs are satis-
fied if she has access to resources adequate for subsistence. Others propose more
capacious understandings. A problem with resting a theory of autonomy on
meeting basic needs is that it leaves questions concerning the autonomy of op-
pressed individuals unresolvable unless a consensus account of basic needs is
in hand.
Moreover, a sensible assessment of the scope of basic needs may not correlate
with intuitions about autonomy. Too meager a list of basic needs would yield an
overinclusive assessment of the prevalence of autonomy and would overlook a
lot of the damage to autonomy that oppression inflicts. If people are getting by,
they’d be presumed to be autonomous. Too generous a list of basic needs would
disrespect the agency of many victims of oppression. Enormous numbers of
people aren’t meeting some of these needs, so they wouldn’t count as autono-
mous. Controversy over which needs are basic together with this potential for
under-​or overinclusive assessments of autonomy leaves the relations between
autonomy and oppression opaque.
Second, Buss maintains that autonomy is a matter of degree. I agree with
Buss that there are degrees of autonomy, but not with her explanation of them.
According to Buss, there must be degrees of autonomy because there is no deter-
minate point at which a character or personality trait becomes a symptom of pa-
thology that disables autonomy (Buss 2012, 675).15 Noting that people are often
ambivalent about where to draw the line between pathology and health and that
cultures draw the line differently, she appears to be saying that since we can’t con-
clusively decide iffy cases, we should regard their autonomy as impaired but not
eradicated. When in doubt, ascribe some autonomy but not full autonomy to an
oppressed agent.
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 151

An illustration clarifies why I consider this account of degrees of autonomy

makeshift. How might Buss analyze the legal quandaries that arise when victims
of domestic violence kill their abusers while they are asleep or otherwise de-
fenseless? She might hold that courts should punish these victims for the crime
of cold-​blooded murder on the grounds that they are representative members
of the human species who pursued minimal flourishing by legally prohibited
means. Yet, because this analysis is deplorably oblivious to what these women
have suffered, Buss might seek out justifications for a more merciful approach.
Reasoning that being subject to unpredictable, but frequent violence instills un-
healthy personality traits that are incompatible with the human flourishing con-
dition, she might hold that courts should decline to punish these victims and
should instead refer them for psychiatric treatment. Supporting this second
analysis, one study reports high rates of depression, PTSD, panic disorder, and
other pathological conditions among women arrested for violence against their
abusers (Stuart et al. 2006).
Yet, not all victims of domestic abuse develop diagnosable pathologies. In
those cases, Buss might contend that courts should regard these victims’ au-
tonomy as impaired to some degree and should therefore exercise mercy, on the
grounds that it’s indeterminate whether these victims are in the grip of psycho-
pathological traits or not. While leniency seems appropriate in cases in which
the alleged perpetrator does not suffer from a diagnosable psychopathology but
has endured severe abuse over an extended period of time, this justification for
leniency makes no sense.
What is missing is a cogent explanation of what is interfering with these
latter victims’ autonomy. Asserting that someone’s autonomy is impaired
doesn’t mean that the speaker isn’t sure about the healthiness of the trait that
brought about the individual’s action. Rather, the speaker is pointing to some-
thing or other that’s hindering the individual’s autonomy but not completely
nullifying it. Perhaps the anxiety induced by the intermittent, but severe vio-
lence made the victim desperate for surcease. Because her abuser kept a loaded
gun at home, killing him offered the only readily available and sure to succeed
route to surcease. Absent violence-​induced desperation and a handy weapon,
she would have acted differently. Buss’s trouble pinpointing factors that di-
minish autonomy is evidence of a fundamental problem with her passivity-​
based theory. Conceiving agentic selves as functioning passively and sidelining
the many ways in which they rely on capacities to interact with their surround-
ings in flourishing-​compatible ways deprives Buss of a sufficiently rich con-
ceptual toolkit to develop a tenable account of degrees of autonomy. Were she
to embrace a capacitation account of autonomy, as I have argued she should,
she would be in a position to notice the diverse forms of interactivity to which
agentic capacities give rise, and she could watch for defects in the workings
152 Self and Selves

of those capacities or wrongful constraints imposed on their workings.16 She

could then point to these agentic privations to make sense of degrees of au-
tonomy, and she could provide a more insightful treatment of the impact of
oppression on agentic subjects.
I agree with Buss that autonomy isn’t best explicated by picking out some kind
of “super agency” (Buss 2012, 678). Where I disagree is that autonomy is some
kind of passivity. In my view, autonomous action is best understood in terms
of the outputs of a repertoire of capacities that enable agentic subjects to grasp
situations, to envisage and evaluate options concordant with their practical
identities, and to carry out the chosen option—​that is, to interact with changing
circumstances.

Passivity versus Capacitation and Interactivity?

The activity/​passivity binary accurately represents very little in the lives of

persons. It certainly doesn’t capture gender or sexual difference, although it
took centuries to debunk those associations.17 Still, this pernicious dichotomy
lingers in our colloquial and philosophical discourses as a nasty but somehow
alluring conceptual trap. I’ve argued that it snares Reader and Buss. No one
will be well served by a “balanced” view of the agentic subject larded with
ostensibly passive features, nor by a passivity theory of the agential self that
obscures the workings of agency—​least of all victims of oppression and other
unjustly inflicted harm.
Vulnerability to individual and institutional aggressors and to oppressive
social structures is a fact of human life. Still, it’s a mistake to think that there
are unjust practices in relation to which autonomous agents are necessarily
passive, helpless, or abject. Likewise, it’s a mistake to expect judgments about
the healthiness or unhealthiness of the attributes that such practices instill to
resolve questions about victims’ autonomy. What is missing in philosophical
views that hold otherwise is an adequate appreciation of the nature and scope
of human capacities to transform and individualize experience in medias res,
capacities that are themselves amenable to cultivation and that vary from indi-
vidual to individual, capacities that sustain interactivity and generate action. If
anyone is tempted to doubt the authority of these capacities as manifestations
of the agentic self, I would urge that David Velleman’s claim that your under-
standing is inalienable insofar as you are an agent helps explain why this sort of
objection isn’t decisive (Velleman 2000, 137–​138). I would amend his sugges-
tion, however, and urge that agentic capacitation includes diverse intellectual,
affective, and corporeal capacities that collaborate to constitute distinctive
agentic subjects.
 Passivity in Theories of the Agentic Self 153

Notes

1. Thanks to members of New York SWIPshop for a lively, productive session on an ear-
lier draft of this chapter. I’m also grateful to audiences at the 2016 Central APA, the
University of Copenhagen, and Wesleyan University. Special thanks to the editors of
this volume, Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, and to Amy Baehr, Nanette Funk,
Serene Khader, Suzy Killmister, and Margaret Walker for helpful comments.
2. Precedents for my view include Taylor’s dialogical account of the self and action and
Gallagher’s interaction theory of agency and social cognition (Taylor 1989, 1995;
Gallagher 2003, 2007, 2008).
3. Curiously, the adjective “passive” commonly refers to motivations or behaviors that
I would characterize as interactive. Passive aggression indirectly expresses hostility
through uncooperative behavior, and passive resistance protests objectionable social
policies or structural arrangements using nonviolent means.
4. See, for example, Meyers (1989), Benson (2000), Friedman (2003), Christman
(2009), and Stoljar (2015).
5. Neither does your body passively suffer the effects of contact with the nonhuman en-
vironment unless your health is severely compromised.
6. For critique of objectification theories of womanhood and their failure to account for
resistance, see Cahill (2011).
7. For discussion, of the fight/​flight/​freeze triad, see Seltzer (2015).
8. I set aside victims of terminal diseases, natural disasters, and accidents.
9. Note that Reader’s claim that you are fully present and alive while enduring harm
rules out the freeze response in which you dissociate from what’s happening.
10. For an account of victims of oppression as resistant—​that is, not passively subsumed
by oppression—​see Lugones (2003, 2006).
11. The percentage of the world’s population that does not have access to adequate and
secure nutrition is huge, and the implication that none of these people is autonomous
and responsible for her actions is, to say the least, troubling.
12. Reader and Buss take contrasting views on suffering. Whereas Reader asserts that
you can be “most yourself ” while suffering, Buss asserts that suffering suppresses or
distorts your practical identity.
13. In fact, there’s a good deal of evidence that psychologically healthy individuals do
tend to overestimate how much control they exert over the course of events. See, for
example, Taylor and Brown (1988). However, this data doesn’t support the conclusion
that they are really passive and exert no control.
14. It’s worth comparing Buss’s position to Serene Khader’s (2011). They agree that sub-
minimal flourishing is a danger signal. However, Khader holds that subminimal
flourishing justifies pursuing dialogical inquiry into whether or not a woman’s seem-
ingly adaptive preferences reflect her autonomous values and desires, whereas Buss
holds that it justifies denying that she is autonomous.
15. She adds, “If someone resists the suggestion that her behavior is a symptom of an
unhealthy mind, and if she takes this position despite acknowledging that the be-
havior tends to have a negative effect on her ability to take care of herself, steer clear
154 Self and Selves

of the law, maintain friendships, and so on, then she is at least implicitly indicting
the social ‘order’ to which she belongs” (Buss 2012, 676). This complicates her posi-
tion by giving political struggle or an objectivist theory of health a role in her theory
of self and action. Unfortunately, I don’t have space to pursue this intriguing line of
thought here.
16. It seems to me that Buss might have relied on her comments about the capacities
necessary for human flourishing to develop an account of degrees of autonomy for
mentally competent victims of domestic abuse who kill their abusers. Noting that do-
mestic abuse puts the capacity to care for yourself at odds with the capacity to avoid
legal trouble, she could have said that this conflict diminishes the degree of autonomy
that victims of such abuse can achieve. I suppose she shuns this explanation because
it highlights capacitation, thereby threatening her claim that autonomy is a form of
passivity.
17. We now know that the vagina isn’t a passive receptacle for the penis, nor is the ovum
an inert cell patiently awaiting penetration by a spermatozoon.

References
Aristotle. 2012. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by Robert C. Bartlett
and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Benson, Paul. 2000. “Feeling Crazy: Self-​Worth and the Social Character of Responsibility.”
In Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social
Self, edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, 72–​93. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Brison, Susan J. 2002. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Buss, Sarah. 2012. “Autonomous Action: Self-​Determination in the Passive Mode.” Ethics
122 (4): 647–​691.
Cahill, Ann J. 2011. “Sexual Violence and Objectification.” In Overcoming Objectification
by Ann J. Cahill, 127–​142. New York: Routledge.
Christman, John. 2009. The Politics of Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, Harry. 1998. “Identification and Externality.” In The Importance of What We
Care About, 58–​69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedman, Marilyn. 2003. Autonomy, Gender, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2003. “Self-​Narrative, Embodied Action, and Social Context.” In
Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium, edited by
Andrzej Wiercinski, 1–​15. Toronto: Hermeneutics Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2007. “Moral Agency, Self-​Consciousness, and Practical Wisdom.”
Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (5–​6): 199–​223.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2008. “Inference or Interaction: Social Cognition without Precursors.”
Philosophical Explorations 11 (3): 163–​174.
Khader, Serene. 2011. Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Lugones, María. 2003. “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker /​Estrategias Tácticas
de la Callejera.” In Pilgrimages/​Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple
Oppressions by María Lugones, 207–​237. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Lugones, María. 2006. “On Complex Communication.” Hypatia. 21 (3): 75–​85.

Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 1989. Self, Society, and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2016. Victims’ Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights.
New York: Oxford University Press.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
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Seltzer, Leon F. 2015. “Trauma and the Freeze Response: Good, Bad, or Both?” Psychology
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uma-​and-​the-​fre​eze-​respo​nse-​good-​bad-​or-​both.
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Freedom, and Autonomy.” In Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression, edited by
Marina Oshana, 105–​123. New York: Routledge.
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Violence.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21 (3): 376–​389.
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Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, 110–​ 133. New York: Oxford
University Press.
 8
The Question of Personal Identity
Susan James

A great deal of recent feminist work on philosophy of mind has been

grounded on a central claim: that the key oppositions between body and
mind, and between emotion and reason, are gendered.1 While the mind and
its capacity to reason are associated with masculinity, the body, together with
our emotional sensibilities, is associated with the feminine. Evidence for this
view comes from at least two sources. First, overtly sexist philosophers have
in the past claimed that women are by nature less capable reasoners than men
and are more prone to ground their judgments on their emotional responses.
These authors have been repeatedly opposed by defenders of women,
whether male or female. Second, feminists have explored ways in which gen-
dered oppositions are at work even in the writings of philosophers who do
not explicitly differentiate the mental capacities of men and women or con-
nect women with the bodily work of reproduction and domestic labor. By
studying the metaphorical structures of philosophical texts, looking at what
may appear to be digressions from the main line of argument, and paying
attention to examples, they have identified persistent patterns of associa-
tion running through the history of philosophy. These patterns can fluctuate
from century to century, from author to author, from work to work, and even
from paragraph to paragraph, but they keep cropping up. They indicate that
the terms associated with the feminine are persistently marginalized by com-
parison with those associated with masculinity, as when the rational powers
of human beings are habitually regarded as more valuable than their emo-
tional skills.2
In the light of this analysis, many feminists have worked to develop philo-
sophical positions which do not devalue the symbolically feminine. They have
done so by unsettling the hierarchical relations between mind and body, and be-
tween reason and emotion, approaching their task in various overlapping ways.
Sometimes they have criticized existing, influential theories of body and mind;
sometimes they have reconceptualized particular topics within the philosophy of
mind; and sometimes they have drawn on the work of authors who have written
“against the grain.”3

Susan James, The Question of Personal Identity In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer
McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0009
 The Question of Personal Identity 157

Personal Identity

Several of these themes can be traced in contemporary feminist writing about

personal identity, which has tended to draw on the insights of psychoanalysis
and postmodernism to explore the ways in which selves are embodied, discon-
tinuous, malleable, and socially constructed.4 At the same time, anglophone
theorists of personal identity have continued to develop a conception of the self
which revolves around a distinction between the psychological and the bodily,
and a related notion of psychological continuity (Shoemaker 1984; Williams
1973; Parfit 1984; Lewis 1983). It is tempting to suppose that these two groups
are addressing different questions: that feminists are for the most part interested
in the variety of ways in which identity can be molded, lived, or transformed;
and that theorists of personal identity are concerned with the prior question of
what it is to have an identity at all. But this suggested division of labor is too
simple. Feminist explorations of the self are, among other things, attempts to
depart from the symbolically masculine character of much of philosophy, and
their concern with embodiment, discontinuity, and social construction is driven
by a desire to avoid reiterating the hierarchical oppositions between mind and
body, reason and emotions. By embodying the self, they aim to undo the deeply
rooted association between the self and the masculine mind; by emphasizing dis-
continuity, they aim to put pressure on the cultural alliance between unity and
masculinity. From a feminist perspective, therefore, the continued dependence
of personal identity theorists on various oppositions that feminist philosophy
aims to dismantle is at least suspicious. In this chapter I shall explore some of the
grounds for this suspicion, and suggest ways in which it is well-​founded.
Contributors to the debate have found it helpful to distinguish two criteria for
continuing personal identity—​bodily continuity and psychological continuity—​
and in this way to separate body and mind. Among feminists, this sort of ap-
proach is widely regarded as worthy of scrutiny, as it is sometimes the prelude
to an attempt to marginalize the body, and with it the symbolically feminine. In
this particular case it is undoubtedly the prelude to a maneuver which reinforces
the mind/​body divide, namely the construction of thought experiments which
press these two apart. In the last few years, a good deal of weight has been placed
on imaginary examples which suggest that psychological as opposed to bodily
continuity is what constitutes a person’s survival. One kind of example, in par-
ticular, has been crucial in securing this view: the much-​cited cases in which,
by some means or other, one person’s character and memories are transplanted
into a second person’s body (Shoemaker 1963; Williams 1973, 46–​63).5 Although
other scenarios such as fission and fusion are also appealed to (Wiggins 1976;
Parfit 1984), transplant cases are a crucial resource on which theorists of various
158 Self and Selves

persuasions rely, and are used to create a framework within which different ac-
counts of survival can be discussed.
To make a case for the view that the debate about personal identity
marginalizes the feminine, and is one of the ways in which philosophy privileges
the symbolically masculine over its feminine counterpart, I shall concentrate on
these examples. I shall try to show how imaginary examples of character trans-
plant are used to sustain a symbolically masculine conception of personhood.
I shall take up four points: one about the delineation of character; a narrower one
about memory; a third about the role of the social world in sustaining identity;
and a fourth about identity and male sexual power.

Delineation of Character

Imaginary cases in which one person’s character is transplanted into another

person’s body generally assume that character has to be lodged in a material body
of some sort. It may be a whole human body, a brain, or half a brain. The body in
question may be inorganic, as when an imaginary machine stores the informa-
tion from one brain and prints it off in another (Shoemaker 1984, 108–​111). But
in all these versions the body is thought of as a container or receptacle for char-
acter. The brain figures as a container in which a person’s psychological states can
be preserved, and the body figures as a more elaborate receptacle for the brain.
Equally, a machine which copies the information from one brain and prints it
into another is a receptacle for storing psychological states.
Several contributors to the literature on personal identity acknowledge that
thinking of the body as a receptacle may be an excessive oversimplification, but
brush this thought aside. In “The Self and the Future,” for example, Bernard
Williams notes that body swapping between people of different sexes may be hard
to imagine, but comments, “Let us forget this” (Williams 1973, 46), so turning his
back on a point he makes elsewhere, that it may be impossible for an emperor
to express his personality when his body is that of a peasant (Williams 1973,
11–​12). Other writers, such as Harold Noonan, note the problem, but bypass it
by specifying that the bodies in question are either only numerically distinct,
or extremely similar (Noonan 1989, 4). Any characteristics that might enable
the body to disrupt the psychological continuity of the character transplanted
into it are removed, with the result that bodies are regarded, for the purposes of
the experiment, as uniform. They do of course differ in various ways, but these
differences are held to be irrelevant.
Making the body anonymous in this way simultaneously affirms a particular
view of what character is. The things that really matter about a person’s character,
the traits which constitute their psychological continuity, do not depend on their
 The Question of Personal Identity 159

having a particular body, or a body with any particular properties. Anthony

Quinton makes this point explicitly. “As things are,” he writes, “characters can
survive large and even emotionally disastrous alterations to the physical type of
a person’s body. . . . Courage, for example, can perfectly well persist even though
the bodily conditions for its obvious manifestation do not” (Quinton 1975, 60).
Courage, perhaps, but what about dexterity? Patience, perhaps, but what about
delight in one’s sexuality? (It would be interesting to consider whether all the
traditional virtues can be construed as independent of the body in this way.)
Quinton’s argument exemplifies a tendency which runs through imagined cases
of character transplant—​a tendency to rely on a conception of character or psy-
chological continuity which serves to emphasize, and even create, a division be-
tween the psychological and the bodily. Properties which do not fit neatly into
the category of the psychological are held to be marginal or irrelevant to char-
acter. Then, if continuity of character is taken to be what matters in survival,
merely bodily states become irrelevant to survival.

Memory

Partly because the states that contribute to psychological continuity are specified
as states that are not bodily, theorists of personal identity are able to be both non-
committal and inclusive about what exactly they are. Lewis, for example, regards
this as a question of detail (Lewis 1983, 56), and Noonan claims that “in general
any causal links between past factors and present psychological traits can be sub-
sumed under the notion of psychological connectedness” (Noonan 1989, 13).6
However, a central role is often given to memories as states which give us access
to our pasts, and secure our sense of temporal continuity. How must memory be
conceived if it is to fulfill this function, while leaving intact the division between
body and character?
At least, I suggest, it must be a storehouse of recollections able to survive
bodily vicissitudes. Take the case of Adam. Whatever happens to him—​even if
he has one of his ribs removed, even if his body changes beyond recognition,
even if God refuses to recognize him—​he will still be able to think of a sequence
of things he did and things that happened to him as his actions and experiences.
More particularly, changes in his body will not interfere with this capacity. For
example, even when he is weak and wasted he remembers that he took the apple
from Eve as a strong young man. Why, then, should this capacity not endure in
the imaginary case where Adam’s character is transplanted into a different body?
There are some obvious exceptions to the view that memory is unaffected
by bodily vicissitudes. For instance, brain damage may make Adam amnesiac,
and if his character is transplanted into a body with a damaged brain, it is not
160 Self and Selves

obvious that his memories will survive. A more interesting example is provided
by cases of physical violation such as rape, other forms of torture, or malicious at-
tack, which often have a profound impact on memory. In an illuminating paper,
Susan Brison makes the point that experiences like these do not simply add to
the victim’s stock of memories, as a camera operator might shoot another few
feet of film, nor are they safely lodged in the mind, as the camera operator might
store the exposed film in a tin (Brison, this volume).7 First, memories of trauma
are in many cases closely tied to the body, indeed are in the body, and manifest
themselves in physical states as much as in psychic ones. Here any neat sepa-
ration between bodily states and memory as the bearer of psychological conti-
nuity seems to break down. To press a tasteless question, would a trauma victim
retain her memories if her character were transplanted into a different body?
Second, trauma destroys or alters existing memories, so that people who have
been subjected to extended torture or deprivation lose conscious memories of
their own pasts, and lose, too, the easy sense of continuity that memory is here
supposed to provide. Their time scale may shrink so that their memories of their
own experiences become mainly short-​term ones. And the continuity of memory
may be punctured and jumbled by uncontrollable, nightmarish recollections.8
If, as much discussion of personal identity assumes, memory is to be one of
the guarantors of psychological continuity, and if psychological continuity is to
be separable from bodily continuity, memory must be interpreted in a particular
and selective way. Memories in the body have to be set aside in favor of those
which appear to have no bodily aspects; and it has to be assumed that the im-
pact of memory loss on other character traits is sufficiently limited for psycho-
logical continuity to survive. It is arguable that these are not very contentious
assumptions. But they nevertheless help us to see that the division between body
and character, around which imaginary transplant cases are organized, can only
be sustained if the traits constituting character are laundered, and all traces of
the body washed away. The purified conception of “the psychological” which
emerges then appears as an unsullied self for which the body is simply a conven-
ient receptacle.

Social Circumstances

The two steps we have examined—​the expelling of everything bodily from the
mind, and the simultaneous devaluation of the bodily—​are familiar to feminists,
many of whom have read them as an attempt to demarcate the masculine from
the feminine and exclude the latter from philosophy. We can find further traces of
this way of proceeding in discussions of personal identity if we focus on another
curious feature of the persons around whom debate rages—​their complete lack
 The Question of Personal Identity 161

of any history or social context. As we have seen, the key question that concerns
philosophers is what it takes for x at t1 to survive at t2. This assumes that we start out
with a fully-​fledged person, which is why I’ve called him Adam. And it assumes that
in ordinary circumstances (if he doesn’t die) he will survive until t2. Philosophers
who regard psychological continuity as what matters in survival thus assume that
psychological continuity is a property of normal human beings.
To take it for granted that Adam at his creation is a person is to suppose that at
that point he has both a body and a character—​a suitably integrated set of memo-
ries, emotions, desires, and so on. The expectation that in normal circumstances
he will survive to be expelled from Paradise has built into it the expectation that
he possesses the means to maintain his character in some body or other, to sat-
isfy the demands of psychological continuity. These are large assumptions which
exclude a good deal. The first excludes the fact that character, in the sense of the
ability to understand oneself as the subject of diverse psychological states, is not
a birthright, but the fruit of a child’s relations with the people who care for him or
her. Theorists of personal identity appear to take a Lockean view of the genesis of
character: once Adam is created, or once a baby reaches a certain stage, memory
starts to roll and an integrated character develops. In doing so they exclude from
consideration some of the ways in which the self is dependent on others, particu-
larly on its mother figure. At the same time they make it unnecessary to consider
whether features of the process by which the self is constituted may affect its sub-
sequent continuity. The second assumption has complementary consequences: it
brackets the question of whether the maintenance of psychological continuity
also depends on social relations.
Particularly since Freud, writers have elaborated the view that a child’s
experiences are not initially integrated or continuous, and are not initially the
experiences of an integrated self. The self for whom psychological continuity is
a possibility has to be created through a series of interactions between the child,
people around it, and the broader culture in which it lives. Equally, psychological
continuity has to be sustained. Social circumstances may foster it; but where the
recognition of others is withdrawn, our emotional investment in our memories
and characters may be so weakened that we suffer a kind of depersonalization—​
an inability to feel that our experiences are our own, and a subsequent inability
to integrate and order them. These finding have an impact on the personal iden-
tity theorist’s assumption that bodily and psychological continuity are theoreti-
cally separable. They point to what is left out in the imaginary cases where it is
assumed that psychological continuity would survive bodily transplant. Suppose
we assume that psychological continuity does depend on the possession of a body
image, and on an emotional investment in it. Is it now so obvious that the features
of the body into which a character is transplanted are irrelevant to its survival?
To dramatize the issue in a manner typical of this philosophical literature, what
162 Self and Selves

about a female fashion model whose character is transplanted into the body of
a male garage mechanic? Might she not find it impossible to reconcile her body
image with the body that had become hers, and suffer such a level of dislocation
that she became unable to locate her experiences in that body? At the limit, might
she not experience the depersonalization suffered by some psychotics, who lose
interest in the whole body and do not invest any narcissistic libido in the body
image? Their self-​observations seem viewed from the perspective of the outsider
and they display no interest in their own bodies (Grosz 1994, 76–​77). Suppose,
by contrast, we imagine a character whose body is transplanted into that of her
identical twin. The point is that she remains psychologically continuous (if she
does) because the body that is now hers has properties which make it possible
for her to live in it as her own. Psychological continuity is not independent of the
body. It is a feature of embodied selves.
If recognition makes a difference, the degree of a person’s psychological con-
tinuity may also depend on social circumstances. To return to the case of the
model, will her friends and lovers continue to recognize and affirm her? Will
she be able to find anyone able to believe her story and hear her out? Anthony
Quinton touches optimistically on the first point:

In our general relations with other human beings their bodies are for the most
part intrinsically unimportant. We use them as convenient recognition devices
enabling us to locate the persisting characters and memory complexes . . . which
we love or like. It would be upsetting if a complex with which we were emotion-
ally involved came to have a monstrous or repulsive physical appearance. . . . But
that our concern and affection would follow the character and memory com-
plex . . . is surely clear. (Quinton 1975, 64)

Quinton is aware that this may not quite settle the argument, and addresses the
looming objection that some personal relations, such as those “of a rather unmit-
igatedly sexual type” might not survive a change of body (Quinton 1975, 65). But
here, too, he resolves the problem confidently:

It can easily be shown that these objections are without substance. In the first
place, even the most tired of entrepreneurs is going to take some note of the
character and memories of the companion of his later nights at work. He will
want her to be docile and quiet, perhaps, and to remember that he takes two
parts of water to one of scotch, and no ice. . . . As a body she is simply an instru-
ment of a particular type. (Quinton 1975, 65–​66)

This solution to the problem employs the strategy we have already examined: it
resolutely divides psychological properties from bodily ones and insists that the
 The Question of Personal Identity 163

former are what matter in recognition. The wish to be loved for oneself alone and
not for one’s golden hair is simply granted. What this solution does not counte-
nance, however, is the possibility that a person’s ability to sustain psychological
continuity may depend on other people recognizing and affirming the proper-
ties and potentialities of their embodied selves, and that where this possibility is
removed, their psychological continuity may be damaged.

Marginalizing the Symbolically Feminine

We can now see more clearly that when personal identity theorists specify that
characters are transplanted into bodies identical with the ones they had before,
they are not introducing innocent simplifications. Instead, they are covering up
and discounting ways in which psychological continuity is woven into the his-
tories of our embodied selves. However, this is not the end of the matter. A the-
orist of personal identity may concede that psychological continuity has to be
created, and that in extreme cases such as psychosis it can be destroyed. But he
or she may nevertheless maintain that, in all ordinary cases, once psycholog-
ical continuity is created, it survives. We see this, for example, in the testimony
of the victims of extreme and extended trauma. While they may not remember
much about their earlier lives, and may now lack well-​defined characters, they
identify with their past selves and speak about them in the first person (albeit
sometimes rather oddly as when they say things like “I died there” or “I shall
always miss myself as I was then”). We see it, too, in cases of physical mutilation
where, although the body image usually takes some time to adjust, people do
not lose all sense of who they are.9 Only in pathological conditions such as psy-
chosis and multiple personality does the self really fragment. So, putting these
last cases aside, are we not right to posit a sense of psychological continuity
which is independent of both bodily and social vicissitudes, or to imagine that
this sense of continuity could survive if a character were transplanted from one
body into another?
The arguments I have offered aim to show that, once we strip this imaginary
situation of features which function to make it appear unproblematic, the kind
of continuity that can be relied on is comparatively attenuated. All we are able
to assume is that the transplanted character is able to locate its experiences in
its new body, and that it remains sufficiently integrated to claim some memo-
ries as its own. We need not assume that it has much emotional investment in
its memories. Nor need we assume much continuity of other character traits.
Psychological continuity features here as a slender lifeline which enables the
transplanted person to say to themselves “I know that such and such happened to
me and that I am so and so” and just about believe it.
164 Self and Selves

The personal identity theorist must be prepared to argue that this minimal
level of continuity is sufficient to sustain the claim that we can fruitfully explore
the question of what is involved in survival by playing off bodily and psycholog-
ical continuity against one another. It seems to me, however, that the attractions
of psychological continuity as a separable component of survival have been
considerably reduced. Let me labor this point. Before, we were imagining that,
transplanted into a new body, I would feel pretty much the same as I do now,
would be able to continue the projects I have now, would be no less committed
to my future than I am now, would have the memories and characteristics I now
possess, and would retain the relations with other people that, so it seems to me,
make life worth living. Now we imagine a situation in which it is much less clear
what transplant will be like, and in which it may give rise to psychic and physical
pain comparable, perhaps, to the pain of torture which looms so large in one of
the problem cases constructed by Williams (Williams 1973, 48). I may lose many
memories and character traits, so that my hold on my own past is tenuous and
emotionally numbed, and my grasp of who I now am is fractured and confused.
I may lose the affection and even recognition of the people who matter to me,
and also the capacity to form new relationships. I may be unable to pursue my
projects or embark on new ones, and may have very little emotional investment
in the life I am living.
Some theorists of personal identity would, I suspect, insist that as long as there
remains a thread of continuity between the pre-​and post-​transplant selves, we
have a case for the conclusion that they are the same person. The barest “I” is
enough to hold the self together and to underwrite an approach to the problem
that separates psychological and bodily continuity. But in the light of the sorts
of difficulties I have discussed it seems reasonable to ask: Why cling to this doc-
trine? Why deploy such resources of imagination to prize the bodily and the psy-
chological apart? And why go to such lengths to protect psychological continuity
from the effects of the body and the rest of the world?
At this point a reader might object that these questions misrepresent the cur-
rent debate. Contemporary theorists of personal identity, it might be claimed,
are by no means agreed that psychological continuity is essential, or even impor-
tant, to personhood, and many of their accounts emphasize the centrality of the
body. This is undoubtedly true. However, the approach I have been discussing
is extremely influential, and continues to shape our understanding of what the
problem of personal identity consists in.10 As long as this much is conceded, the
questions I have posed remain pertinent.
Feminists who have addressed these questions have frequently drawn on a
conception of the self which is set over against, though not completely irrecon-
cilable with, the view of personal identity we have been examining, insofar as it
holds that there is an important aspect of the psyche, the unconscious, which this
 The Question of Personal Identity 165

view neglects. To accept that the unconscious is at work when we philosophize

is to accept that the psychological discontinuities so evident in pathological
cases are present to some degree in all of us. Some aspects of the self are simply
not picked up by accounts which emphasize psychological continuity, and the
decision to discount these may itself have unconscious motivations. Taking
the unconscious into account, then, feminist philosophers have explained the
prominence of views which regard the body as unimportant to identity in var-
ious ways. Some have argued for the view that, in European culture, the mind is
associated with masculinity and the body with femininity. One term can stand
in for, or symbolize, the other. Philosophers (most of them men) have employed
these associations. They have assumed (often unconsciously) that personal iden-
tity is male identity, and have developed accounts in which the symbolically mas-
culine mind is given priority over the body (Lloyd 1984; Spelman 1982). Other
writers have provided psychological explanations for this downgrading of the
symbolically feminine. When male personal identity theorists construct imag-
inary examples which separate the bodily from the psychological, they resolve
in fantasy the always-​unresolved conflicts of the Oedipus complex—​the sepa-
ration of a male child from his mother figure, and his subsequent identification
with his father. In establishing and maintaining a firm boundary between the
maternal body and the paternal mind, they deny their own unconscious desire
to be reunited with the mother figure. And in fixing on psychological continuity
as the mark of identity, they construct a picture in which masculinity and self-
hood coincide.11 A further aspect of the transplant fantasy also serves to exclude
the feminine. By positing fully-​fledged persons whose history is irrelevant to the
problem at hand, male philosophers imagine for themselves a condition of self-​
sufficiency, from which their indebtedness to a mother figure, or indeed to an-
yone else, is excluded.
These two types of explanation (one cultural, the other psychological) have
a good deal in common. Both rest on the claim that philosophers (male and fe-
male) are themselves psychologically discontinuous, in the commonplace sense
that their unconscious fears and desires play a part in determining the way they
formulate and argue about problems, and the sorts of arguments they find per-
suasive, although this is not an aspect of their philosophizing over which they
have conscious control. Moreover, both assume that particular associations at
work in our culture continue to play a significant part in shaping our philosoph-
ical beliefs. According to the first kind of view, symbolic associations help to ex-
plain the fact that we privilege some terms over others. According to the second,
these symbolic associations are themselves embedded in the psychological pro-
cesses that form sexual identity.
Over the last two decades, feminist philosophers have amassed a range of
evidence for both the explanatory hypotheses I have sketched. However, it
166 Self and Selves

remains to ask what internal support we can find for the view that theorists
who equate personal identity with psychological continuity are upholding
(however unconsciously) a masculine conception of identity. I have assumed,
uncontentiously I hope, that we sometimes find clues to the unconscious in
questions that hover round the margins of a text, so that when Williams or
Noonan allows that transplant from one body into a very different one might
be difficult, and then immediately put the problem aside, it is probably worth
looking further.12 I have also assumed—​and Williams and Quinton make this
explicit—​that what they are putting aside here is the issue of sexual identity.13
To return to the fantasy of character transplant, there are in principle a va-
riety of ways of thinking about the case of a male character transplanted into
a female body. Maybe it would be the ideal sex-​change operation. Maybe it
would condemn the resulting person to the unhappy condition of someone
who desperately wants a sex-​change operation. Maybe it would produce psy-
chological breakdown. As we have seen, most writers block off exploration of
lines of thought like these, which require us to think of the people concerned as
embodied, in their investigations of personal identity. Why? Perhaps because
they take it that the identity of a person is the identity of a male. Perhaps be-
cause an unconscious fear of jeopardizing their sexual identity prevents them
from doing so, and helps to direct them toward an approach which brackets the
body and concentrates on the mind.
It may be helpful to consider what kinds of criticism I have offered of the view
that personal identity consists in psychological continuity. In the preceding
sections of this chapter I have voiced some objections to this analysis which can
be assessed independently of any claims about gender as arguments to the ef-
fect that authors who appeal to a particular kind of thought experiment rely on
an inadequate conception of the self. Not only do the limitations of the concep-
tion they employ undermine the particular conclusions they draw from their
thought experiments, but their very approach, which works with an oversim-
plified conception of memory, neglects the social construction of the self, and is
insensitive to the ways in which selves are embodied. At the same time, however,
I have claimed that the issue of gender is woven into arguments which rely on
fantasies of brain transplant, and to bring this out I have asked what is going on
when philosophers advance them. What is being said, explicitly and implicitly,
and why? One of the things going on, so I have suggested, is that a symbolically
masculine account of identity is being unselfconsciously articulated. A skepti-
cally inclined reader may still wish to ask whether this diagnosis amounts to a
criticism beyond those set out in the first part of the chapter. What is wrong with
the symbolically masculine account, other than the fact that it suffers from the
deficiencies just summarized?
 The Question of Personal Identity 167

To answer this question, it is helpful to distinguish the type of criticism which

pinpoints a particular flaw in a position from the type which indicates the
shortcomings of an approach. The diagnosis I have offered is of the latter kind.
Its critical force rests on the assumptions that we are in search of philosophical
interpretations that answer to our experience and acknowledge the complexity
of our lives, and that, in the case of personal identity, part of this complexity lies
in sexual identity. Theories which neglect or disavow sexual difference there-
fore cut themselves off from an important set of issues, and in doing so render
themselves philosophically impoverished. To show how this occurs is not, of
course, to specify what a feminist analysis of personal identity would be like, or
to explore how a focus on sexual difference alters our understanding of the re-
lation between personhood and embodiment, though many of the works cited
throughout the chapter undertake these very tasks. My aim has been to articulate
some of the features of an analytical approach to personal identity which leave
feminist philosophers dissatisfied, and which explain the fact that their work has
developed in different directions.

Identity and Social Power

The symbolic gendering of the opposition between body and mind, on which
I have so far concentrated, has provided an exceptionally fruitful focus for
feminist research. Nevertheless, it is important not to assume too readily that
the body always figures as feminine and the mind as masculine, or to take
it for granted that gender is exclusively associated with these terms.14 Some
theorists, I have been arguing, locate personal identity in a mind which they
interpret as masculine; but there is also evidence that a man’s continuing iden-
tity is sometimes implicitly understood to depend on his ability to control a
woman. Here the issue is not how the “components” of a person are gendered,
but how the relations between people of different sexes bear on the problem
of identity. If social relations can secure or destroy continuing identity, as
I suggested earlier on, they will provide another area in which identity and
gender intertwine.
This motif is central to some works of literature. For example, in Janet Lewis’s
novella The Wife of Martin Guerre, Martin Guerre leaves his village and family and
does not come back (Lewis 1977). Eight years later he returns—​or rather, an im-
postor arrives, who slips into Guerre’s place and takes up the life he had left behind.
Some time goes by before Guerre’s wife, tortured by the belief that the impostor is
not her husband, and that she is an adulteress, confesses her suspicions, and the
impostor is brought to trial. Just as judgment is about to be announced, the original
Martin Guerre walks into the courtroom, and the impostor is punished with death.
168 Self and Selves

In this narrative, it becomes important to establish the impostor’s identity because

he is usurping Guerre’s sexual rights over his wife, or to put it another way, because
Guerre has lost control over her. She is out of his control, and her independence of
him is part of what threatens to obliterate Guerre’s social identity, insofar as it is one
of the conditions that allow the impostor to “become” him. The trial restores both
Guerre’s identity and sexual order.
We find the same link between identity and male sexual power in Honoré de
Balzac’s story about Colonel Chabert, who, when the tale begins, has been listed
among the casualties of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign (Balzac 1961). His name
has appeared on the list of valiant heroes who sacrificed their lives for France, his
wife has remarried, and his house has been sold. But in fact the Colonel has sur-
vived, and after several years returns to Paris, determined to reclaim his wife. Once
again, loss of identity is linked to loss of control over a woman, and his desire to
have his wife back is what drives the Colonel to explain his plight to a young lawyer,
who takes up his case and tries to negotiate a settlement. In the course of the nego-
tiations the Colonel comes to see that his wife is a ruthless and avaricious woman
who will never return to him, and has never loved him anyway, and renounces his
desire to reclaim her. But the recognition that he cannot possess her destroys him,
and in the final scene the lawyer comes across him, unkempt and listless, sitting on
a log beside the road staring vacantly into space. Here, loss of power over a woman
is associated not just with loss of social identity but with psychological disconti-
nuity. To be sure, Colonel Chabert is deprived of his social identity; but he loses
more than this, and although the man sitting on the log may know who he is, his
discontinuity with his past self prevents him from functioning.

When theorists of personal identity focus on psychological continuity as the

stronghold of the self, and construe psychological continuity as independent of
bodily continuity, they secure only a self which would in other circumstances
be regarded as pathologically disturbed. This is, to be sure, a self of sorts, and
one consonant with the problem “What is it to survive?” which already carries
connotations of minimal continuity, of enduring against the odds and in the face
of obstacles. Perhaps the question we should be addressing, then, is why the an-
alytical philosophical tradition has been so concerned to explore and defend
this minimal notion of survival, and hence personhood. Part of the explanation,
I have suggested, lies in cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity
which are at work in the unconscious, and consequently in philosophy. At the
heart of identity lies the issue of sexual identity, and with it the desire of a male-​
dominated tradition to secure the masculinity of the subject and the subordina-
tion of women. This commonplace drama is played out in various philosophical
arenas, but is worked through with particular intensity in the problem of identity
itself.
 The Question of Personal Identity 169

Notes

1. This chapter was previously published in The Cambridge Companion to

Feminism in Philosophy, edited by Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, 29–​
48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is reprinted here with
abridgements and slight modifications with the permission of the author and press.
Many helpful comments were made on an earlier draft of this chapter. I am grateful
to the contributors to the conference “Feminism and the Philosophy of Mind” held
at the University of London; to the Philosophy Department seminars at University
College Dublin and at the University of York; and to John Dupré, Miranda Fricker,
Jennifer Hornsby, Moira Gatens, Kathleen Lennon, Quentin Skinner, and Catherine
Wilson.
2. See Merchant (1980), Spelman (1982), Lloyd (1984, 1993), Keller (1985), Irigaray
(1985), Le Dœuff (1980), Chanter (1995), and Deutscher (1997).
3. Such reconceptualizations especially drawing on psychoanalytic theories include
Mitchell (1974), Gallop (1982), Brennan (1989, 1992), Benjamin (1990), and Grosz
(1994).
4. See, for example, Braidotti (1994), Butler (1990), Gatens (1996), Grosz (1994), and
Young (1990).
5. For further discussion, see the articles collected in Noonan (1993).
6. See also Parfit (1984, 205).
7. The present section and the next are deeply indebted to Brison’s chapter. For discus-
sion of some closely related issues, see Campbell (1997, 51–​62).
8. Writers on personal identity usually try to take account of the loops, breaks and fade-​
outs in our memories by emphasizing that psychological continuity requires only
a sequence of overlapping sequences. Furthermore, it is added that where memory
breaks down, other continuities such as those in a person’s desires, intentions, or
hopes can take over. However, Brison’s discussion shows that trauma victims do not
just lose their memories of past events or actions. They lose the pattern of memory in
which their expectations, emotions, skills, desires, and so on are rooted, so that loss of
memory is, in these cases, part of a broader destruction of character.
9. See, for example, the discussion of phantom limbs in Schilder (1978, 64).
10. With some exceptions—​see, for example, the animalist views defended in Olson
(1997) and Snowdon (1995)—​even philosophers who do not regard psychological
continuity as essential to personal identity continue to treat the body as a container
for the mind.
11. There are several variants of this view. For discussion of Freud, see Mitchell (1974)
and Gallop (1982); on object relations theory, see Benjamin (1990); and for the view
that these patterns of development are to be explained by child-​rearing practices, see
Chodorow (1978).
12. For discussion of this view, see Le Dœuff (1980) and Deutscher (1997).
13. At the same time, they are implicitly putting aside other dimensions of identity, for
instance racial identity, which may be intimately connected to the body.
14. For a particularly helpful discussion of these instabilities, see Deutscher (1997).
170 Self and Selves

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Domination. London: Virago.
Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Campbell, Sue. 1997. Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings.
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Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of
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Lloyd, Genevieve. 1993. “Maleness, Metaphor and the ‘Crisis’ of Reason.” In A Mind of
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Charlotte Witt, 69–​83. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Lewis, 55–​72. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, Janet. 1977. The Wife of Martin Guerre. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Mitchell, Juliet. 1974. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Noonan, Harold. 1989. Personal Identity. London: Routledge.
Olson, Eric. 1997. The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology.
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Parfit, Derek. 1971. “Personal Identity.” Philosophical Review 80 (1): 3–​27.
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Quinton, Anthony. 1975. “The Soul.” In Personal Identity, edited by J. Perry, 53–​72.
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Schilder, Paul. 1978. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. New York: International
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Shoemaker, Sydney. 1963. Self-​Knowledge and Self-​Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University

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Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 PART III
NAT U R A L ISM A ND
NOR MAT IV I T Y
 9
Sexual Ideology and
Phenomenological Description
A Feminist Critique of Merleau-​Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception
Judith Butler

Theories of sexuality which tend to impute natural ends to sexual desire are very
often part of a more general discourse on the legitimate locations of gender and
desire within a given social context.1 The appeal to a natural desire and, as a cor-
ollary, a natural form of human sexual relationships is thus invariably normative,
for those forms of desire and sexuality which fall outside the parameters of the
natural model are understood as unnatural and, hence, without the legitimation
that a natural and normative model confers. Although Maurice Merleau-​Ponty
does not write his theory of sexuality within an explicitly political framework,
he nevertheless offers certain significant arguments against naturalistic accounts
of sexuality that are useful to any explicit political effort to refute restrictively
normative views of sexuality. In arguing that sexuality is coextensive with exist-
ence, that it is a mode of dramatizing and investigating a concrete historical sit-
uation, Merleau-​Ponty appears to offer feminist theory a view of sexuality freed
of naturalistic ideology, one which restores both the historical and volitional
components of sexual experience and, consequently, opens the way for a fuller
description of sexuality and sexual diversity.
In the section of Merleau-​Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The
Body in Its Sexual Being,” the body is termed a “historical idea” rather than “a nat-
ural species” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 170). Significantly, Simone de Beauvoir takes
up this claim in The Second Sex, quoting Merleau-​Ponty to the effect that woman,
like man, is a historical construction bearing no natural telos, a field of possibil-
ities that are taken up and actualized in various distinctive ways (Beauvoir 1953,
38). To understand the construction of gender, it is not necessary to discover a
normative model against which individual instances can be gauged, but, rather,
to delimit the field of historical possibilities which constitute this gender, and to
examine in detail the acts by which these possibilities are appropriated, drama-
tized, and ritualized. For Merleau-​Ponty, the body is a “place of appropriation”

Judith Butler, Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0010
176 Naturalism and Normativity

and a mechanism of “transformation” and “conversion,” an essentially dramatic

structure which can be “read” in terms of the more general life that it embodies.
As a result, the body cannot be conceived of as a static or univocal fact of exist-
ence, but, rather, as a modality of existence, the “place” in which possibilities are
realized and dramatized, the individualized appropriation of a more general his-
torical experience.
And yet, the potential openness of Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of sexuality is de-
ceptive. Despite his efforts to the contrary, Merleau-​Ponty offers descriptions of
sexuality which turn out to contain tacit normative assumptions about the heter-
osexual character of sexuality. Not only does he assume that sexual relations are
heterosexual, but that the masculine sexuality is characterized by a disembodied
gaze that subsequently defines its object as mere body. Indeed, as we shall see,
Merleau-​Ponty conceptualizes the sexual relation between men and women on
the model of master and slave. And although he generally tends to discount nat-
ural structures of sexuality, he manages to reify cultural relations between the
sexes on a different basis by calling them “essential” or “metaphysical.” Hence,
Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of sexuality and sexual relations at once liberates and
forecloses the cultural possibility of benign sexual variation. Insofar as feminist
theory seeks to dislodge sexuality from those reifying ideologies which freeze
sexual relations into “natural” forms of domination, it has both something to
gain and something to fear from Merleau-​Ponty’s theory of sexuality.

Merleau-​Ponty’s Criticisms of Reductive Psychology

In arguing that “sexuality is coextensive with existence,” Merleau-​Ponty refutes

those theoretical efforts to isolate sexuality as a “drive” or a biological given of
existence. Sexuality cannot be reduced to a specific set of drives or activities, but
must be understood as subtending all our modes of engagement in the world.
As an inexorable “aura” and “odor,” sexuality is an essentially malleable quality,
a mode of embodying a certain existential relation to the world, and the spe-
cific modality of dramatizing that relation in corporeal terms. According to
Merleau-​Ponty, there are two prominent theoretical attitudes toward sexuality
which are fundamentally mistaken. The one regards sexuality as a composite set
of drives which occupy some interior biological space and which, consequent
to the emergence of these drives into conscious experience, become attached
to representations. This contingent relation between drive and representation
results in the figuration of drives as “blind” or motored by an internal teleology
or naturalistic mechanism. The objects to which they become attached are only
arbitrary foci for these drives, occasions or conditions for their release and grati-
fication, and the entire life of the drive takes place within a solipsistic framework.
 Sexual Ideology 177

The other theory posits sexuality as an ideational layer which is projected onto
the world, a representation which is associated with certain stimuli and which,
through habit, we come to affirm as the proper domain of sexuality. In the first
instance, the reality of sexuality resides in a set of drives which pre-​exist their
representation, and in the second case, the reality of sexuality is a production of
representation, a habit of association, a mental construction. In both cases, we
can see that there is no intentional relation between what is called a “drive” and its
“representation.” As intentional, the drive would be referential from the outset;
it could only be understood in the context of its concrete actualization in the
world, as a mode of expressing, dramatizing, and embodying an existential rela-
tion to the world. In the above two cases, however, sexuality is solipsistic rather
than referential, a self-​enclosed phenomenon which signals a rupture between
sexuality and existence. As a drive, sexuality is “about” its own biological neces-
sity, and as a representation, it is a mere construct which has no necessary rela-
tion to the world upon which it is imposed. For Merleau-​Ponty, sexuality must
be intentional in the sense that it modalizes a relationship between an embodied
subject and a concrete situation: “bodily existence continually sets the prospect
of living before me. . . . [M]‌y body . . . is also what opens me out upon the world
and places me in a situation there” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 165).
Written in 1945, Phenomenology of Perception offered an appraisal of psycho-
analytic theory both appreciative and critical. On the one hand, Freud’s conten-
tion that sexuality pervades mundane existence and structures human life from
its inception is accepted and reformulated by Merleau-​Ponty in the latter’s claim
that sexuality is coextensive with existence. And yet, in Merleau-​Ponty’s descrip-
tion of psychoanalysis, we can discern the terms of his own phenomenological
revision of that method. Note in the following how Freud’s theory of sexuality
comes to serve the phenomenological and existential program:

For Freud himself the sexual is not the genital, sexual life is not a mere effect
of the processes having their seat in the genital organs, the libido is not an
instinct, that is, an activity naturally directed towards definite ends, it is the
general power, which the psychosomatic subject employs, of taking root in dif-
ferent settings, of establishing himself through different experiences. . . . It is
what causes a man [sic] to have a history. In so far as a man’s [sic] sexual history
provides a key to his life, it is because in his sexuality is projected his manner of
being towards the world, that is, towards time and other men [sic]. (Merleau-​
Ponty 1962, 158)

Merleau-​Ponty’s presumption that the Freudian libido is “not an instinct”

does not take into account Freud’s long-​standing ambivalence toward a
theory of instinctual sexuality, evident in the 1915 essay, “Instincts and Their
178 Naturalism and Normativity

Vicissitudes” (1976), in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1950), and in his

later speculative writings (1961). Unclear, for instance, is how strictly Freud
maintained the distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt), and
the extent to which drives are viewed as a necessary mythology or part of
the framework of naturalistic ideology. Freud’s theory of psychosexual de-
velopment very often relies on a naturalistic theory of drives whereby the
normal development of a sexual drive culminates in the restriction of ero-
togenic zones to the genital and the normative valorization of heterosexual
coitus. Although complicated and varied in its methodological style, Freud’s
book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality nevertheless tends to subject the
analysis of the body in situation to a description of the internal teleology of
instincts which has both a natural and normal life of its own (Freud 1962).2
Indeed, as a drive which develops along natural and normal lines, sexuality is
figured as precisely the kind of naturalistic construction that Merleau-​Ponty
views as contrary to his intentional view. And as a “psychical representative of
an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation,” the sexual drive
is precisely the kind of arbitrary construct that Merleau-​Ponty also wants to
repudiate (Freud 1962, 34).
But even more curious is Merleau-​Ponty’s attribution to Freud of a uni-
fied agent whose reflexive acts are manifest in his/​her sexual life. In arguing
that “the psychosomatic subject” takes root and establishes him/​herself in dif-
ferent settings and situations, Merleau-​Ponty glosses over the psychoanalytic
critique of the conscious subject as a product of unconscious desires and the
mechanism of repression. In effect, Merleau-​Ponty assimilates the psychoana-
lytic subject to a reflexive Cartesian ego, a position that psychoanalytic theory
sought to criticize as much more limited in its autonomy than rationalist phi-
losophy had presumed.
In light of Merleau-​Ponty’s curious appropriation of psychoanalysis, it seems
clear that he rejects any account of sexuality which relies upon causal factors
understood to precede the concrete situation of the individual, whether those
factors are natural or unconscious. Moreover, he refuses to accept any normative
conception of sexuality such that particular social organizations of sexuality ap-
pear either more normal or more natural than others. We will later see, however,
that while he does not assert such a telos, he nevertheless assumes one at var-
ious crucial points in the theory. Despite the alleged openness and malleability
of sexuality in Merleau-​Ponty’s view, certain structures emerge as existential and
metaphysical necessities which ultimately cast doubt upon Merleau-​Ponty’s non-
normative pretensions. Indeed, despite his trenchant critique of naturalistic ac-
counts of sexuality, it becomes unclear whether Merleau-​Ponty is himself wholly
freed of naturalistic ideology.
 Sexual Ideology 179

The Constitution of Sexuality: Nature, History, and Existence

For Merleau-​Ponty, the various expressions of human sexuality constitute pos-

sibilities arising from bodily existence in general; none can claim ontological
priority over any other. Sexuality is discussed in general terms as a mode of
situating oneself in terms of one’s intersubjectivity. Little more is said, not be-
cause Merleau-​Ponty thinks sexuality is abstract, but because the multifarious
expressions of sexuality have only these expressive and intersubjective qualities
in common. In its fundamental structure, sexuality is both reflexive and corpo-
real and signifies a relation between the embodied subject and others. The indi-
vidual who is clinically considered asexual is misunderstood by the vocabulary
that names him or her; “asexuality” reveals a definite sexual orientation, what
Merleau-​Ponty describes as “a way of life—​an attitude of escapism and need of
solitude—​. . . a generalized expression of a certain state of sexuality. . . . [T]‌he fact
remains that this existence is the act of taking up and making explicit a sexual
situation” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 169). On the other hand, sexuality is never ex-
perienced in a pure form such that a purely sexual state can be achieved: “Even
if I become absorbed in the experience of my own body and in the solitude of
sensations, I do not succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world.
At every moment some intention springs afresh from me” (Merleau-​Ponty
1962, 165).
As “a current of existence,” sexuality has no necessary forms, but presents it-
self as having-​to-​be-​formed. Sexuality is not a choice inasmuch as it is a nec-
essary expression of bodily existence and the necessary medium of “choice.” In
opposition to Jean-​Paul Sartre’s claim in Being and Nothingness that the body
represents a factic limitation to choice, the constraining material perspective,
Merleau-​Ponty argues that the body is itself a modality of reflexivity, a specifi-
cally corporeal agency. In this sense, then, sexuality cannot be said to “represent”
existential choices which are themselves pre-​or non-​sexual, for sexuality is an
irreducible modality of choice. And yet, Merleau-​Ponty acknowledges that sexu-
ality cannot be restricted to the various reflexive acts that it modalizes; sexuality
is always there, as the medium for existential projects, as the ceaseless “current”
of existence. Indeed, in the following, Merleau-​Ponty appears to invest sexuality
with powers that exceed those of the individual existence which gives it form:

Why is our body for us the mirror of our being, unless it is a natural self, a cur-
rent of given existence, with the result that we never know whether the forces
that bear on us are its or ours—​or with the result rather that they are never
entirely either its or ours. There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than
there is any sexuality enclosed within itself. (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 171)
180 Naturalism and Normativity

This “natural” current is thus taken up through the concrete acts and gestures of
embodied subjects and given concrete form, and this form thus becomes its spe-
cific historical expression. Thus, sexuality only becomes historical through indi-
vidual acts of appropriation, “the permanent act[s]‌by which man [sic] takes up,
for his own purposes, and makes his own a certain de facto situation” (Merleau-​
Ponty 1962, 172).
Here it is clear that while each individual confronts a natural sexuality and a
concrete existential situation, that situation does not include the history of sex-
uality, the legacy of its conventions and taboos. It seems we must ask whether
individuals do not confront a sedimented sexuality, and if so, are not the indi-
vidual acts of appropriation less transformations of a natural sexuality into a his-
torically specific sexuality than the transformation of past culture into present
culture? It is unclear that we could ever confront a “natural” sexuality which was
not already mediated by language and acculturation and, hence, it makes sense
to ask whether the sexuality we do confront is always already partially formed.
Merleau-​Ponty is doubtless right in claiming that there is no outstripping sex-
uality, that it is there, always to be reckoned with in one way or another, but
there seems no prima facie reason to assume that its inexorability is at once its
naturalness. Perhaps it is simply the case that a specific formation of culturally
constructed sexuality has come to appear as natural.
According to his own arguments, it would seem that Merleau-​Ponty would
discount the possibility of a subject in confrontation with a natural sexuality. In
his words, “there is history only for a subject who lives through it, and a sub-
ject only insofar as he is historically situated” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 173). Yet,
to say that the subject is historically situated in a loose sense is to say only that
the decisions a subject makes are delimited—​not exclusively constituted—​by a
given set of historical possibilities. A stronger version of historical situatedness
would locate history as the very condition for the constitution of the subject, not
only as a set of external possibilities for choice. If this stronger version were ac-
cepted, Merleau-​Ponty’s above claim with regard to a natural sexuality would be
reversed: individual existence does not bring natural sexuality into the historical
world, but history provides the conditions for the conceptualization of the indi-
vidual as such. Moreover, sexuality is itself formed through the sedimentation of
the history of sexuality, and the embodied subject, rather than an existential con-
stant, is itself partially constituted by the legacy of sexual relations which consti-
tute its situation.
Merleau-​Ponty’s anthropological naiveté emerges in his view of how cul-
tural conventions determine how the lived body is culturally reproduced. He
distinguishes, mistakenly I believe, between biological subsistence and the do-
main of historical and cultural signification: “ ‘living’ (leben) is a primary process
from which, as a starting point, it becomes possible to ‘live’ (erleben) this or that
 Sexual Ideology 181

world, and we must eat and breathe before perceiving and awakening to rela-
tional living, belonging to colours and lights through sight, to sounds through
hearing, to the body of another through sexuality, before arriving at the life of
human relations” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 160). When we consider, however, the
life of the infant as immediately bound up in a set of relationships whereby it
receives food, shelter, and warmth, it becomes impossible to separate the fact of
biological subsistence from the various ways in which that subsistence is admin-
istered and assured. Indeed, the very birth of the child is already a human rela-
tion, one of radical dependence, which takes place within a set of institutional
regulations and norms. In effect, it is unclear that there can be a state of sheer
subsistence divorced from a particular organization of human relationships.
Economic anthropologists have made the point various times that subsistence
is not prior to culture, that eating and sleeping and sexuality are inconceivable
apart from the various social forms through which these activities are ritualized
and regulated.
In accounting for the genesis of sexual desire, Merleau-​Ponty once again
reverts to a naturalistic account which seems to contradict his own phenome-
nological procedure. In the following, he attributes the emergence of sexuality
to the purely organic function of the body: “there must be, immanent in sexual
life, some function which insures its emergence, and the normal extension of
sexuality must rest on internal powers of the organic subject. There must be Eros
or Libido which breathes life into an original world” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 156).
Once again, it appears that sexuality emerges prior to the influence of histor-
ical and cultural factors. And yet, theorists such as Michel Foucault have argued
that cultural conventions dictate not only when sexuality becomes explicit, but
also in what form. What leads Merleau-​Ponty, then, to safeguard this aspect of
sexuality as prior to culture and history? What dimensions of “natural” sexu-
ality does Merleau-​Ponty wish to preserve such that he is willing to contradict
his own methodology in the ways that he has? Although Merleau-​Ponty is clearly
concerned with sexuality as the dramatic embodiment of existential themes, he
distinguishes between those existential themes that are purely individual, and
those that are shared and intersubjective. Indeed, it appears, for him, that sex-
uality dramatizes certain existential themes that are universal in character, and
which, we will see, dictate certain forms of domination between the sexes as
“natural” expressions of sexuality.

Misogyny as an Intrinsic Structure of Perception

Not only does Merleau-​Ponty fail to acknowledge the extent to which sexuality is
culturally constructed, but his descriptions of the universal features of sexuality
182 Naturalism and Normativity

reproduce certain cultural constructions of sexual normalcy. The case of the

sexually disinterested Schneider is a rich example. In introducing the reader to
Schneider, Merleau-​Ponty refers to his “sexual incapacity,” and throughout the
discussion it is assumed that Schneider’s state is abnormal. The evidence that
Merleau-​Ponty provides in support of this contention is considered to be ob-
vious: “Obscene pictures, conversations on sexual topics, the sight of a body do
not arouse desire in him” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 155). One wonders what kind
of cultural presumptions would make arousal in such contexts seem utterly
normal. Certainly, these pictures, conversations, and perceptions already desig-
nate a concrete cultural situation, one in which the masculine subject is figured
as viewer, and the yet unnamed feminine subject is the body to be seen.
In Merleau-​Ponty’s view, evidence of Schneider’s “sexual inertia” is to be found
in a general lack of sexual tenacity and willfulness. Deemed abnormal because he
“no longer seeks sexual intercourse of his own accord,” Schneider is subject to
the clinical expectation that sexual intercourse is intrinsically desirable regard-
less of the concrete situation, the other person involved, the desires and actions
of that other person. Assuming that certain acts necessitate a sexual response,
Merleau-​Ponty notes that Schneider “hardly ever kisses, and the kiss for him has
no value as sexual stimulation. . . . If orgasm occurs first in the partner and she
moves away, the half-​fulfilled desire vanishes”; this gesture of deference signifies
masculine “incapacity,” as if the normal male would seek satisfaction regardless
of the desires of his female partner (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 155).
Central to Merleau-​Ponty’s assessment of Schneider’s sexuality as abnormal
is the presumption that the decontextualized female body, the body alluded to
in conversation, the anonymous body which passes by on the street, exudes a
natural attraction. This is a body rendered irreal, the focus of solipsistic fantasy
and projection; indeed, this is a body that does not live, but a frozen image which
does not resist or interrupt the course of masculine desire through an unex-
pected assertion of life. How does this eroticization of the decontextualized body
become reconciled with Merleau-​Ponty’s insistence that “what we try to possess
is not just a body, but a body brought to life by consciousness” (Merleau-​Ponty
1962, 167)?
Viewed as an expression of sexual ideology, Phenomenology of Perception
reveals the cultural construction of the masculine subject as a strangely disem-
bodied voyeur whose sexuality is strangely non-​corporeal. Significant, I think,
is the prevalence of visual metaphors in Merleau-​Ponty’s descriptions of normal
sexuality. Erotic experience is almost never described as tactile or physical or
even passionate.3 Although Merleau-​Ponty explains that “perception” for him
signifies affective life in general, it appears that the meaning of perception oc-
casionally reverts to its original denotation of sight. Indeed, it sometimes
appears as if sexuality itself were reduced to the erotics of the gaze. Consider the
 Sexual Ideology 183

following: “In the case of the normal subject, a body is not perceived merely as
an object; this objective perception has within it a more intimate perception: the
visible body is subtended by a sexual schema which is strictly individual, empha-
sizing the erogenous areas, outlining a sexual physiognomy, and eliciting the
gestures of the masculine body which is itself integrated into this emotional to-
tality” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 156).
As Merleau-​Ponty notes, the schema subtending the body emphasizes the
erogenous zones, but it remains unclear whether the “erogenous areas” are
erogenous to the perceiving subject or to the subject perceived. Perhaps it is
significant that Merleau-​Ponty fails to make the distinction, for as long as the
erotic experience belongs exclusively to the perceiving subject, it is of no con-
sequence whether the experience is shared by the subject perceived. The para-
graph begins with the clear distinction between a perception which objectifies
and decontextualizes the body and a perception which is “more intimate,” which
makes of the body more than “an object.” The schema constitutes the intimate
perception, and yet, as the schema unfolds, we realize that as a focusing on erog-
enous parts it consists in a further decontextualization and fragmentation of the
perceived body. Indeed, the “intimate” perception further denies a world or con-
text for this body, but reduces the body to its erogenous (to whom?) parts. Hence,
the body is objectified more drastically by the sexual schema than by the objec-
tive perception.
Only at the close of the paragraph do we discover that the “normal subject” is
male, and “the body” he perceives is female. Moreover, the sexual physiognomy
of the female body “elicit[s]‌the gestures of the masculine body,” as if the very ex-
istence of these attributes “provoked” or even necessitated certain kinds of sexual
gestures on the part of the male. Here it seems that the masculine subject has
not only projected his own desire onto the female body, but then has accepted
that projection as the very structure of the body he perceives. Here the solip-
sistic circle of the masculine voyeur seems complete. That the masculine body
is regarded as “integrated into this emotional totality” appears as a bizarre con-
clusion considering that his sole function has been to fulfill a spectatorial mode.
In contrast to this normal male subject is Schneider, for whom it is said “a
woman’s body has no particular essence.” Nothing about the purely physical con-
struction of the female body arouses Schneider: “It is, he says, predominantly
character which makes a woman attractive, for physically they are all the same”
(Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 156). For Merleau-​Ponty, the female body has an “essence”
to be found in the “schema” that invariably elicits the gestures of masculine de-
sire, and although he does not claim that this perception is conditioned by a
natural or mechanistic causality, it appears to have the same necessity that such
explanations usually afford. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how Merleau-​
Ponty, on other occasions in the text, makes general claims about bodies which
184 Naturalism and Normativity

starkly contradict his specific claims about women’s bodies, unless by “the body”
he means the male body, just as earlier the “normal subject” turned out to be
male. At various points, he remarks that “bodily existence . . .is only the barest
raw material of a genuine presence in the world,” a “presence” which one might
assume to be the origin of attractiveness, rather than the sexual schema taken
alone (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 165). And rather than posit the body as containing
an “essence,” he remarks that “the body expresses existence” (Merleau-​Ponty
1962, 166). To maintain, then, that the female body has an essence qua female
and that this essence is to be found in the body contradicts his more general
claim that “the body expresses total existence, not because it is an external ac-
companiment to that existence, but because existence comes to its own in the
body” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 166). And yet, female bodies appear to have an es-
sence which is itself physical, and this essence designates the female body as an
object rather than a subject of perception. Indeed, the female body is seemingly
never a subject, but always denotes an always already fixed essence rather than
an open existence. She is, in effect, already formed, while the male subject is in
exclusive control of the constituting gaze. She is never seeing, always seen. If the
female body denotes an essence, while bodies in general denote existence, then
it appears that bodies in general must be male—​and existence does not belong
to women.
That Schneider finds only women with character arousing is taken as proof
that he suffers from a sublimation of his true desires, that he has rationalized the
object of his desire as a bearer of virtue. That Schneider conflates a moral and a
sexual discourse is, for Merleau-​Ponty, evidence of repression, and yet it may be
that after all Schneider is more true to Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenological ac-
count of bodily existence than Merleau-​Ponty himself. By refusing to endow a
woman with an essence, Schneider reaffirms the woman’s body as an expression
of existence, a “presence” in the world. Her body is not taken as a physical and
interchangeable fact, but expressive of the life of consciousness. Hence, it appears
that Schneider is a feminist of sorts, while Merleau-​Ponty represents the cultural
equation of normalcy with an objectifying masculine gaze and the corollary de-
valuation of moral concerns as evidence of pathology.

The Sexual Ideology of Master and Slave

The ideological character of Phenomenology of Perception is produced by the

impossible project of maintaining an abstract subject even while describing
concrete, lived experience. The subject appears immune from the historical ex-
perience that Merleau-​Ponty describes, but then reveals itself in the course of
the description as a concrete cultural subject, a masculine subject. Although
 Sexual Ideology 185

Merleau-​Ponty intends to describe the universal structures of bodily exist-

ence, the concrete examples he provides reveal the impossibility of that project.
Moreover, the specific cultural organization of sexuality becomes reified through
a description that claims universality. On the one hand, Merleau-​Ponty wants
sexuality to be intentional, in-​the-​world, referential, expressive of a concrete, ex-
istential situation, and yet he offers a description of bodily experience clearly ab-
stracted from the concrete diversity that exists. The effect of this abstraction is
to codify and sanction one particular cultural organization of sexuality as legiti-
mate. Hence, the promise of his phenomenological method to provide a nonnor-
mative framework for the understanding of sexuality proves illusory.
Central to his argument is that sexuality instates us in a common world. The
problem arises, however, when the common world he describes is a reification
of a relation of domination between the sexes. Although he argues that sexuality
makes us a part of a universal community, it becomes clear that this “univer-
sality” characterizes a relationship of voyeurism and objectification, a nonrecip-
rocal dialectic between men and women. In claiming that this universal dialectic
is to be found in lived experience, Merleau-​Ponty prefigures the analysis of lived
experience, investing the body with an ahistorical structure which is in actu-
ality profoundly historical in origin. Merleau-​Ponty begins his explanation of
this structure in the following way: “The intensity of sexual pleasure would not
be sufficient to explain the place occupied by sexuality in human life or, for ex-
ample, the phenomenon of eroticism, if sexual experience were not, as it were,
an opportunity vouchsafed to all and always available, of acquainting oneself
with the human lot in its most general aspects of autonomy and dependence”
(Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 167). The dynamics of autonomy and dependence char-
acterize human life universally and “arise from the metaphysical structure of my
body.” Moreover, this dynamic is part of “a dialectic of the self and other which is
that of master and slave: insofar as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status
of an object beneath the gaze of another person, and no longer count as a person
for him, or else I may become his master and, in my turn, look at him” (Merleau-​
Ponty 1962, 167).
Master-​slave is thus a metaphysical dynamic insofar as a body is always an
object for others inasmuch as it is perceived. Perception designates an affec-
tive relation and, in the context of sexuality, signifies desire. Hence, a body
is an object to the extent that it is desired, and is, in turn, a subject, inasmuch
as it desires. Hence, being desired is equivalent to enslavement, and desiring
is equivalent to mastering. Taken yet further, this dialectic suggests that the
master, as the one who desires, is essentially without a body; indeed, it is a body
which he desires to have. In other words, active desire is a way of dispensing
with the existential problematic of being a body-​object. In phenomenological
terms, active desire is a flight from embodiment. The slave is thus designated as
186 Naturalism and Normativity

the body that the master lacks. And because the slave is a body-​object, the slave
is a body without desire. Hence, in this relationship, neither master nor slave
constitutes a desiring body; the master is desire without a body, and the slave is
a body without desire.
We can speculate yet further upon this “metaphysical” structure of bodily ex-
istence. The desire of the master must always be the desire to possess what he
lacks, the body which he has denied and which the slave has come to embody. The
slave, on the other hand, is not a person—​a body expressive of consciousness—​
much less a person who desires. Whether or not the slave desires is irrelevant
to the master, for his desire is self-​sufficient; it posits the object of its desire and
sustains it; his concern is not to be a body, but to have or possess the body as an
object. But what does it mean to say that the master does not have a body? If the
body is a “situation,” the condition of perspective and the necessary mediation
of a social existence, then the master has denied himself the condition for a gen-
uine presence in the world and has become worldless. His desire is thus both an
alienation of bodily existence and an effort to recapture the body from this self-​
imposed exile, not to be this body, but this time to possess and control it in order
to nurse an illusion of transcendence. Desire thus signifies an effort at objectifi-
cation and possession, the master’s bizarre struggle with his own vulnerability
and existence that requires the slave to be the body the master no longer wants to
be. The slave must be the Other, the exact opposite of the Subject, but neverthe-
less remain his possession.
If the slave is a body without desire, the very identity of the slave forbids
desire. Not only is the desire of the slave irrelevant to the master, but the emer-
gence of the slave’s desire would constitute a fatal contradiction in the slave’s
identity. Hence, the liberation of the slave would consist in the moment of
desire, for desire would signal the advent of a subject, a body expressive of
consciousness.
Although Merleau-​Ponty does not equate the master with the male body or
the slave with the female body, he does tend, as we have seen, to identify the
female body with a sexual schema of a decontextualized and fragmented body.
Read in light of Beauvoir’s later claim in The Second Sex, that women are cultur-
ally constructed as the Other, reduced to their bodies and, further, to their sex,
Merleau-​Ponty’s description of the “metaphysical” structure of bodily existence
appears to encode and reify that specific cultural dynamic of heterosexual rela-
tions. Strangely enough, Merleau-​Ponty’s effort to describe lived experience ap-
peals to an abstract metaphysical structure devoid of explicit cultural reference,
and yet once this metaphysical structure is properly contextualized as the cul-
tural construction of heterosexuality, we do, in fact, seem to be in the presence
of a widely experienced phenomenon. In effect, Phenomenology of Perception
makes gestures toward the description of an experience which it ultimately
 Sexual Ideology 187

refuses to name. We are left with a metaphysical obfuscation of sexual experi-

ence, while the relations of domination and submission that we do live remain
unacknowledged.

Toward a Phenomenological Feminism

In his incomplete and posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-​Ponty criticizes Sartre for maintaining the subject-​object distinction in
his description of sexuality and bodily existence (Merleau-​Ponty 1968). In the
place of a social ontology of the look, Merleau-​Ponty suggests an ontology of
the tactile, a description of sensual life which would emphasize the interworld,
that shared domain of the flesh which resists categorization in terms of subjects
and objects. It may well be that by the time Merleau-​Ponty undertook that study
at the end of his life, he had achieved philosophical distance from the sexual
Cartesianism of his phenomenological colleagues, and that the reification of vo-
yeurism and objectification that we have witnessed would no longer conform to
that later theory. At the time of Phenomenology of Perception, however, Merleau-​
Ponty accepts the distinction in a limited but consequential way. As a result, he
accepts the dialectic of master and slave as an invariant dynamic of sexual life.
Both “subject” and “object” are less givens of lived experience than metaphys-
ical constructs that inform and obfuscate the theoretical “look” that constitutes
sexuality as a theoretical object. Indeed, the greatest obfuscation consists in
the claim that this constructed theoretical vocabulary renders lived experience
transparent.
Merleau-​Ponty’s conception of the “subject” is additionally problematic in
virtue of its abstract and anonymous status, as if the subject described were a uni-
versal subject or structured existing subjects universally. Devoid of a gender, this
subject is presumed to characterize all genders. On the one hand, this presump-
tion devalues gender as a relevant category in the description of lived bodily
experience. On the other hand, inasmuch as the subject described resembles
a culturally constructed male subject, it consecrates masculine identity as the
model for the human subject, thereby devaluing, not gender, but women.
Merleau-​Ponty’s explicit avoidance of gender as a relevant concern in the de-
scription of lived experience, and his implicit universalization of the male sub-
ject, are aided by a methodology that fails to acknowledge the historicity of
sexuality and of bodies. For a concrete description of lived experience, it seems
crucial to ask whose sexuality and whose bodies are being described, for “sexu-
ality” and “bodies” remain abstractions without first being situated in concrete
social and cultural contexts. Moreover, Merleau-​Ponty’s willingness to de-
scribe a “natural sexuality” as a lived experience suggests a lamentable naiveté
188 Naturalism and Normativity

concerning the anthropological diversity of sexual expressions and the lin-

guistic and psychosomatic origins of human sexuality. In the end, the version
of “lived experience” commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, giving life
to abstractions, and draining life from existing individuals in concrete contexts.
What is the historical genesis of the “subject” that Merleau-​Ponty accepts as an
a priori feature of any description of sexuality? Does this “subject” not denote a
given history of sexual relations which have produced this disembodied voyeur
and his machinations of enslavement? What social context and specific history
have given birth to this idea and its embodiment?
Merleau-​Ponty’s original intention to describe the body as an expressive
and dramatic medium, the specifically corporeal locus of existential themes,
becomes beleaguered by a conception of “existence” which prioritizes hypothet-
ical natural and metaphysical structures over concrete historical and cultural
realities. A feminist critique of Merleau-​Ponty necessarily involves a decon-
struction of these obfuscating and reifying structures to their concrete cultural
origins, and an analysis of the ways in which Merleau-​Ponty’s text legitimates
and universalizes structures of sexual oppression. On the other hand, a feminist
appropriation of Merleau-​Ponty is doubtless in order. If the body expresses and
dramatizes existential themes, and these themes are gender-​specific and fully
historicized, then sexuality becomes a scene of cultural struggle, improvisation,
and innovation, a domain in which the intimate and the political converge, and a
dramatic opportunity for expression, analysis, and change. The terms of this in-
quiry, however, will not be found in the texts of Merleau-​Ponty, but in the works
of philosophical feminism to come.

Notes

1. This chapter was previously published in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern
French Philosophy, edited by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young, pp. 85–​ 100
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989). It is reprinted here with permis-
sion of the author and editors.
2. See Freud (1962, 13–​14): “We have been in the habit of regarding the connection
between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is.
Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the
sexual instinct and the sexual object are soldered together—​a fact which we have
been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal pic-
ture, where the object appears to be part and parcel of the instinct.” Not only is the
instinct ontologically independent of the object, but it follows a development toward
a reproductive telos whereby “the sexual object recedes into the background” (Freud
1962, 15). The normal development of this “instinct” dictates active sexual behavior
for the male, and passive sexual behavior for the female with the consequence that the
 Sexual Ideology 189

reversal of roles signifies an abnormal sexuality, that is, one which has not developed
according to the proper internal teleology (Freud 1962, 26). Sexuality which is not re-
stricted to the erotogenic zones characterizes “obsessional neurosis” (Freud 1962, 35).
The perversions thus characterize underdeveloped stages of instinctual development,
and are in that sense “normal” inasmuch as those stages must be lived through. For
Freud, however, they come to represent abnormalities when they are not relinquished
in favor of heterosexual coitus. This link between normal sexuality and reproduction is
recast in his theory of Eros in Civilization and Its Discontents (1961).
3. In The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-​Ponty’s posthumously published work,
his discussion of sexuality focuses on tactile experience and marks a significant depar-
ture from the visual economy of Phenomenology of Perception.

References
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1953. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York:
Vintage Books.
Freud, Sigmund. 1950. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey.
London: William Brown.
Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Civilization and its Discontents. Edited by Philip Rieff. New York:
Macmillan.
Freud, Sigmund. 1962. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James
Strachey. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” In General Psychological Theory,
edited by Philip Rieff, 84–​90. New York: Macmillan.
Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith.
New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso
Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
 10
Enactivism and Gender Performativity
Ashby Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie

The enactivist paradigm of embodied cognition represents a powerful al-

ternative to Cartesian and cognitivist approaches in the philosophy of mind
and the cognitive sciences. On this view, the body plays a constitutive role
in the integrated functioning of perception, affect, and other cognitive pro-
cesses. Moreover, cognition is understood to emerge from the ongoing in-
teraction of an organism with its physical and (in the case of humans and
many animals) social environment. Human mindedness, then, is funda-
mentally embodied, embedded, and intersubjective. In this chapter, we will
extend the enactivist approach to examine the larger interpersonal and so-
cial contexts that frame embodied practices. Empathy, the embodied affec-
tive connectedness that serves as a basic connection between individuals,
has been investigated within the enactive approach. However, the ways in
which our intersubjective relationships are positioned within larger cultural
and political frameworks has not received as much attention in the literature
on embodied and embedded cognition. In order to get a fuller sense of how
selves and worlds co-​emerge and are co-​constituted by this interrelationship,
we need to examine the embeddedness of our embodied experience in various
systems of meaning and forms of power.
Our enactive analysis of human sociality and meaning focuses on notions
of identity, difference, and power, as discussed most thoroughly by femi-
nist theorists, through the primary lens of gender. The enactive approach to
embodied cognition already shares many of the long-​standing themes and
contentions of feminist theory. Like many feminist philosophers, the enactive
approach criticizes mind-​body dualisms, the separation of reason and emotion,
and atomistic individualism, and emphasizes the deeply embodied, value-​laden,
and situated nature of human experience. We think the enactive approach in phi-
losophy of mind and cognitive science provides further support for these core
feminist themes, and it may open new avenues of inquiry and intervention re-
lated to them. Yet, while the enactive approach explicitly acknowledges the in-
tersubjective, social, and cultural nature of human experience and cognition, its
account of these dimensions remains underdeveloped. In particular, enactivism
has not thematized the critical role of power in shaping and reshaping lifeworlds

Ashby Butnor and Matthew MacKenzie, Enactivism and Gender Performativity In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0011
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 191

and the individuals that enact them. Here we must turn to the analyses of femi-
nist theory to enrich and extend enactivism.
In so doing, we will first lay out the key components of an enactive theory of
mind, including autonomy, sense-​making, emergence, embodiment, and experi-
ence, as well as some distinct features of human experience, namely, value, affect,
and sociality. After discussing how selves and worlds co-​emerge and co-​create
meaning on a primitive level, we will apply these underlying mechanisms to ex-
plain larger and more complex social manifestations, specifically gender perfor-
mance and its reproduction through time. By employing Judith Butler’s notion
of performativity, we will demonstrate how gender, as one marker of social iden-
tity and difference, emerges through similar processes, feedback loops, and rela-
tional domains of significance and valence that are at the heart of enactive theory.
While applying ideas from enactive theory to social identity and perfor-
mance is interesting in its own right, we see further value in using these insights
to shed light on how oppressive systems maintain and perpetuate themselves
and, importantly, how they may be interrupted and revised. We argue that atten-
tion to the embodied, embedded, sense-​making-​and-​maintaining interactions
that partly constitute systems of oppression should be critically evaluated and
assessed to understand their role in reproducing harm to both individuals and
communities.
Fortunately, while our embodied ways of being in the world are always socially
embedded, the particular nature of our various worlds is merely contingent.
Thus, particular configurations of cultural worlds need not be seen as essential,
necessary, or inevitable. Furthermore, it is not the case that individuals, as body-​
subjects, simply take the brunt of enforced social meanings. Rather, as work in
embodied cognition amply supports, there is a reciprocal relationship between
subject and world. Therefore, we have the capacity to revise social meanings and
enact different kinds of worlds—​worlds that are more conducive to individual
and social flourishing, rather than harm and oppression. The goal of this chapter
will be to bring feminist philosophy and the enactive approach into dialogue to
highlight their explanatory and, perhaps, liberatory potentials.

The Enactive Approach

In The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch
argue that cognition should be understood neither as the recovery of a pregiven
outer world, nor the projection of a pregiven inner world, but rather as a form
of embodied action (Varela et al. 1993, 172). By “embodied” they mean to high-
light two points: “first, that cognition depends on the kinds of experience that
come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that
192 Naturalism and Normativity

these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more

encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context” (Varela et al. 1993,
173). By “action,” they “mean to emphasize once again that sensory and motor
processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cogni-
tion. Indeed, the two are not merely contingently linked in individuals; they have
also evolved together” (Varela et al. 1993, 173).
At the risk of oversimplification, we can say that there are five highly inter-
connected ideas at the core of enactivism: autonomy, sense-​making, emergence,
embodiment, and experience (Di Paolo et al. 2010, 37). First, on the enactivist
view, living beings are self-​organizing, autopoietic (self-​making), and auton-
omous (self-​individuating) systems. An autonomous system generates and
maintains its identity through continuous matter-​energy turnover and in pre-
carious external conditions. More specifically, an autonomous system is char-
acterized by organizational and operational closure. In organizational closure a
system or process creates a boundary, which subsequently both constrains and
enables the further operations of the system. For instance, at the cellular level,
a self-​organizing process of biochemical reactions produces a membrane that,
in turn, constrains the process that created it (Weber and Varela 2002). The
completion of this loop gives rise to a distinct biological entity that maintains
its own boundary in its environment. Organizational closure, on this view,
constitutes the system as a unity in its context. Living systems are also oper-
ationally closed in that “for any given process P that forms part of the system
(1) we can find among its enabling conditions other processes that make up the
system, and (2) we can find other processes in the system that depend on P” (Di
Paolo et al. 2010, 38). That is, the internal processes of the system recursively
depend on each other.
It is worth noting that the notion of autonomy central to enactivism is dis-
tinct from certain common metaphysical and ethical notions of autonomy.
Metaphysically, the enactive account of biological autonomy does not entail—​
and indeed enactivism rejects—​any strong notion of ontological independence.
On the enactivist view, an organism is not a substance metaphysically inde-
pendent of all other substances, but rather a thoroughly relational self-​organizing
process. Organisms are internally relational systems, and only emerge and main-
tain themselves in interdependence with a dynamic environment. Moreover, the
notion of biological autonomy here is distinct from notions used in ethics. Yet,
given the enactivist’s fundamentally relational account of organism and agency
and the commitment to the dynamic co-​constitution of subject and world, the
enactivist view looks incompatible with any notion of autonomy based on atom-
istic individualism. Indeed, while we cannot pursue the point here, the enactivist
approach may be more in accord with feminist theories of relational autonomy
(Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000).
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 193

In addition, cognitive systems display adaptive autonomy or adaptivity. All

autopoietic systems are dynamically coupled to their environments. However,
adaptive systems have the capacity to regulate their interactions with the envi-
ronment. For instance, even single-​celled organisms such as E. coli engage in
positive and negative chemotaxis, that is, movement in response to chemical
stimulus. The organism detects glucose and swims in the direction of its highest
concentration. Likewise, it can swim away from noxious stimuli. The organiza-
tionally and operationally closed system here regulates its interaction with its
environment.
The second core idea of the enactive approach is that adaptive autonomy is the
root of cognition and cognition is sense-​making. According to Thompson:

Sense-​making is threefold: (1) sensibility as openness to the environment (in-

tentionality as openness); (2) significance as positive or negative valence of en-
vironmental conditions relative to the norms of the living being (intentionality
as passive synthesis—​passivity, receptivity, and affect); and (3) the direction or
orientation the living being adopts in response to significance and valence (in-
tentionality as protentional and teleological). (Thompson 2011, 119)

In its basic form, then, sense-​making is a complex process in which these aspects
are intertwined. During normal waking experience, we are open to the world
through our senses in a general way and the sensory field is further structured
by selective attention. For instance, one may be focused on a painting, while also
being peripherally aware of background noise. The phenomena of which we are
aware are often experienced as positively or negatively valenced. The background
noise may be annoying, while the painting is beautiful. Further, as valenced, phe-
nomena may call forth from us a certain orientation or action. The painting may
elicit closer inspection or a change in vantage point, while the annoying sound
may pull attention away from the painting. Fundamentally, the emergence of an
autonomous organism entails the emergence of a field of possible interactions
between that organism and the larger environment. Some interactions will allow
the organism to continue and even thrive, while others can harm or kill it. Thus,
the environment takes on significance and valence: some events are dangerous
for the organism, some things are food, and so on. What we label the organism’s
physical surroundings becomes for it an environment, a relational domain of sig-
nificance and valence.
Co-​emergent with sentient and mobile beings is a sensorimotor world, which
in turn shapes the ongoing dynamics, structure, and viability of the organism.
To be alive is to come into being in the midst of this circular process. To remain
alive entails making sense of (that is, acting appropriately in relation to) the sig-
nificance and valence of one’s world. The organism engages in sense-​making at
194 Naturalism and Normativity

a variety of levels. First, the very sense of the world will be partly a function of
the structure, capacities, and evolutionary history of the organism. Second, sense
(significance and valence) is enacted and transformed through the organism’s ac-
tion in the world, for example, in exploration of the sensorimotor environment.
Further, enactivists recognize the central importance of affect and emotion as
forms of sense-​making. Third, the organism makes sense of its world through
viable conduct, which is arguably the most primitive form of circumspection or
understanding. Overall, we can say that sense-​making for the viable organism
involves a form of experiential niche construction. That is, the organism enacts a
world through ongoing adaptive interaction with a physical environment.
The third core idea of enactivism is emergence. Sentient beings are not un-
derstood as heteronomous, mechanical input-​output systems, but rather as
dynamic, autonomous systems that regulate their ongoing coupling with the
environment. Autonomous systems, then, involve emergent processes. As
Thompson describes, “An emergent process belongs to an ensemble or network
of elements, arises spontaneously or self-​organizes from the locally defined and
globally constrained or controlled interactions of those elements, and does not
belong to a single element” (Thompson 2007, 60). Emergent processes, and
the systems in which they arise, exhibit two forms of determination. Local-​to-​
global determination involves the emergence of novel macro-​level processes and
structures based on changes in the system components and relations. Global-​to-​
local determination involves macro-​level processes and structures constraining
local interactions. Thus, self-​organizing systems display circular causality: local
interactions give rise to global patterns or order, while the global order constrains
the local interactions (Haken 2004).
The type of self-​production and self-​maintenance found in living systems goes
beyond the type of self-​organization seen in nonliving systems. A Bénard cell, as
a dissipative system, will display self-​organization and self-​maintenance to a de-
gree, but the key boundary conditions that keep the system away from equilibrium
are exogenous. In contrast, in truly autonomous systems, “the constraints that ac-
tually guide energy/​matter flows from the environment through the constitutive
processes of the system are endogenously created and maintained” (Ruiz-​Mirazo
and Moreno 2004, 238). Thus the degree of autonomy found in living beings is, ac-
cording to the enactive approach, a form of dynamic co-​emergence.

Dynamic co-​emergence best describes the sort of emergence we see in au-

tonomy. In an autonomous system, the whole not only arises from the (organi-
zational closure of the) parts, but the parts also arise from the whole. The whole
is constituted by the relations of the parts, and the parts are constituted by the
relations they bear to one another in the whole. Hence, the parts do not exist in
advance, prior to the whole, as independent entities that retain their identity in
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 195

the whole. Rather, part and whole co-​emerge and mutually specify each other.
(Thompson 2007, 65)

The fourth core idea of the enactive approach is that cognition is fundamen-
tally embodied. Cognition is sense-​making, and sense-​making is adaptive inter-
action between organism and environment. All of this is rooted in and depends
on the integrated structures and capacities of the living body. As Ezequiel Di
Paolo and Thompson put it, “Without a body, there cannot be sense-​making.
Moreover, sense-​making is a bodily process of adaptive self-​regulation. The
link between the body and cognition is accordingly constitutive and not merely
causal. To be a sense-​maker is, among other things, to be autonomous and pre-
carious, that is, is to be a body, in the precise sense of ‘body’ that the enactive ap-
proach indicates” (Di Paolo and Thompson 2014, 76). Organisms respond to the
significance and valence of patterns in the environment, but these patterns only
have the significance they do in relation to the needs and capacities of particular
living bodies. The connection between embodiment as adaptive biological au-
tonomy and cognition as sense-​making is constitutive, not merely causal. On the
enactive approach, “the body is the ultimate source of significance; embodiment
means that mind is inherent in the precarious, active, normative, and worldful
process of animation” (Di Paolo et al. 2010, 42). Further, as we discuss below, the
human body is also a social and cultural body, and sense-​making includes social,
linguistic, and cultural dimensions.
The fifth and final core element of the enactive approach is the topical and
methodological centrality of experience. Here, experience refers not to isolated
qualia or phenomenal properties, but to the cognitive, conative, affective, and
sensory aspects of sense-​making as lived through by the subject. That is, expe-
rience is sense-​making as lived. Recall that, on the enactive approach, the self-​
individuation of a living system entails the arising of a kind of interiority and
perspective on the world. The biological system enacts a/​its self. In enacting it-
self, it enacts its world. A world is a relational domain of significance, from the
point of view of the organism and its needs and capacities. The ongoing enacting
of self and world is sense-​making and sense-​making is necessarily lived through
from the point of view of the organism. What it is like to adaptively engage the
world of significance and valence just is the biological subject’s experience. Thus,
experience, on the enactive view is always first-​personal—​in the minimal sense
of being lived through from a point of view—​embodied, and interactive.
Yet, while constitutively first-​personal, there is no assumption that phenom-
enal experience is intracranial. As Diego Cosmelli and Evan Thompson put it:

According to the “enactive” view of experience, consciousness is a life-​

regulation process of the body interacting with its environment. Perception,
196 Naturalism and Normativity

action, emotion, imagination, memory, dreaming—​these are modes of self-​

regulation that depend directly on the living body and not just the brain.
According to the enactive view, the body shouldn’t be seen as a mere outside
causal influence on an exclusively neuronal system for consciousness because
the minimal requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just
neuronal events in the skull. (Cosmelli and Thompson 2011, 164)

Hence, phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally an embodied, emergent

biological capacity and process. Furthermore, experience is methodologically
central to enactivism in two basic and interconnected ways. First, fidelity to the
depth and complexity of lived experience serves as a fundamental constraint
on the adequacy of enactivist accounts. Second, enactivism strives to integrate
first-​, second-​, and third-​person methods of inquiry into a more comprehen-
sive account of life and mind. Hence, on this view, there can be no complete,
nonexperiential (that is, purely third-​person) account of life and mind.

The Social Dimension

Beyond the above core features, the enactive approach understands human
experience as deeply value-​laden, affective, and social. Sense-​making is a con-
stitutively evaluative process—​it discloses the world and the organism’s own
interactions in terms of their significance and valence. “An organism’s world,”
write Tom Froese and Ezequiel Di Paolo, “is primarily a context of significance
in relation to that organism’s particular manner of realizing and preserving its
precarious identity” (Froese and Di Paolo 2009, 444). Further, the more flexibly
adaptive the subject, the richer and more complex will be the value-​dimension
of her lifeworld. The valence landscape of the single-​celled organism such as
E. coli will be much simpler than that of the social primate like the bonobo. At
the most basic level, “something acquires meaning for an organism to the ex-
tent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the mainte-
nance of the organism’s integrity” (Thompson 2007, 70). For E. coli, the values
may be simply metabolic and tied very closely to ongoing sensorimotor inter-
action with the environment. For the bonobo, the value landscape will be tied to
its vastly more complex capacities for perception, action, emotion, and sociality.
The key point here is that cognition (in the narrow sense) and evaluation, fact
and value are deeply entangled on the enactive approach. The lifeworld is nec-
essarily value-​laden, and the value-​dimension is neither simply recovered nor
projected. Rather the value-​dimension is both enacted and disclosed through
sense-​making.
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 197

Furthermore, the enactive approach sees human experience as fundamen-

tally intersubjective and social. According to Thompson, the enactive account of
human intersubjectivity rests on two central ideas.

The first idea is that self and other enact each other reciprocally through
empathy. One’s consciousness of oneself as a bodily subject in the world
presupposes a certain empathic understanding of self and other. The second
idea is that human subjectivity emerges from developmental processes of en-
culturation and is configured by the distributed cognitive web of symbolic cul-
ture. For these reasons, human subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity,
and no mind is an island. (Thompson 2007, 382–​383)

The earliest forms of empathy can be seen in what developmental

psychologists term “primary intersubjectivity” (Trevarthen 1979). Primary
intersubjectivity involves sensorimotor capacities that enable relations and
interactions with others (Gallagher 2012). These capacities, which are in-
nate or early-​developing, manifest in the ability to perceive another’s feelings
and intentions through their movements, facial expressions, gestures, and
so on, and to respond with our own movements, expressions, and the like.
Newborn infants, for instance, can perceive and imitate facial expressions,
a capacity that is both sensory-​ motor and interpersonally interactive
(Meltzoff and Moore 1977). At around two months, infants develop the
ability to follow the gaze of another, sense what the other is looking at, and
even anticipate the other’s intentions (Baron-​C ohen 1995). Primary inter-
subjectivity continues to develop so that, by the end of the first year of life,
“infants have a non-​mentalizing, perception-​b ased, embodied and prag-
matic grasp of the emotions and intentions of other persons” (Gallagher
2012, 197).
At around nine months, children begin to develop forms of secondary inter-
subjectivity. Through the development of joint attention, children are able to en-
gage in triadic interaction between the child herself, another, and an object or
event. Secondary intersubjectivity involves the development of two processes. As
Gallagher summarizes:

(1) They refer to others (in social referencing) and enter into joint actions
where they learn how objects are used by using them and from seeing others
use them, and they begin to co-​constitute the meaning of the world through
such interactions with others in a process of “participatory sense-​making”; and
(2) they build upon theses interactions to makes sense of the other’s behavior in
specific contexts. (Gallagher 2012, 197)
198 Naturalism and Normativity

This transition from social interaction to participatory sense-​making is cen-

tral to the enactive understanding of full human sense-​making. Participatory
sense-​making is “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby
individual sense-​making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-​
making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own”
(De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 497). For instance, language learning and use
open up a vast array of new modes of individual and social sense-​making oth-
erwise unavailable to us. The social and cultural dimensions of the human life-
world are the product of participatory sense-​making, and this sense-​making is
itself shaped by sociocultural structures. Thus, the social meanings of gender,
race, sexual orientation, class, and so on are also co-​enacted in and through
embodied, perceptual, affective, and cognitive processes.

Gender Performance as Sense-​Making

In accord with the central ideas of the enactive approach, social meaning is not
just cognitive and symbolic, but always embodied, enacted, and affective as
well. To date, the enactivist approach has not primarily been employed to in-
vestigate social meaning in terms of how sense-​making emerges through pow-
erful markers of identity and difference, such as race, class, sexual orientation,
and gender. Like more simple forms of sense-​making, these social categories
are co-​enacted in and through embodied, perceptual, affective, and cognitive
processes and yet remain undertheorized as a significant co-​emergent feature
of human lifeworlds from an enactive approach. Our goal here, then, is to ex-
tend the insights of enactive theory to social identity, social practices, and social
meanings to both highlight how these phenomena emerge through a complexity
of interactions between selves and worlds, and demonstrate how we may concep-
tualize or, better, enact different and better selves and worlds.
According to the enactivist view, the lived body is metabolically, composition-
ally, and functionally plastic: “Both the nervous system and the body . . . can alter
their structure and dynamics by incorporating (taking into themselves) pro-
cesses, tools, and resources that go beyond what the biological body can met-
abolically generate (artificial organs and neural and sensorimotor prostheses)”
(Thompson and Stapleton 2008, 28). But what about the incorporation of so-
cial and cultural forms? The process of enculturation in specific environments
also involves a process of incorporation of the gendered (and raced, classed,
sexed, etc.) behaviors that are being played out around us. As we perform and
enact the social scripts of our historical situation, they in turn inscribe them-
selves upon our bodies and indeed become our lived experience of embodiment
in the world. Significantly, this process of incorporation involves intersubjective
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 199

resonance with other embodied persons in our environments. And it operates at

both the primary and secondary levels of intersubjectivity. As Joan Mason-​Grant
explains:

Other beings—​human and nonhuman animals—​are . . . part of our phenom-

enological anatomy. We are involved in processes of mutual incorporation in
which my corporeality in its functional telos is necessarily supplemented and
extended through my relationship with others. As I spend time with someone
I care about and come to know them intimately, I often incorporate their way of
engaging the world, their mannerisms, their phrases, even their views, as they
may incorporate mine, and our perception, judgment, and interactive know-​
how thereby transforms. (Mason-​Grant 2004, 107)

This intersubjective incorporation begins with familial intimacy, but then

extends beyond to freely chosen groups (such as friendships, social networks,
or religious associations) and social identities, such as gender, race, class, ability,
sexuality, and so on.
Gender provides a ready example of how social meanings are enacted in
and through human bodies. Expressions of gendered meaning can range from
styles of hair, dress, and comportment to familial roles, career tracks, and life
aspirations depending on place and historical period. Gender performance can
be understood as a multivalent form of participatory sense-​making. Examples
of gendered performance abound in everyday life—​from the choice of outfit in
the morning, to expectations of who will care for children, to how one sits on
the subway on the way home from work—​all express attitudes and expectations
of typical gender categories. Gender, though, is not stable over time or across
environments. Like other forms of sense-​making, gender is neither the simple
projection of a pregiven identity, nor the simple mirroring or recovery of ex-
ternal norms. Rather, it is an ongoing, embodied negotiation within and to the
gendered social milieu. Even gender-​nonconforming performances take place
within a gendered space of meaning. In her theory of gender performativity,
Judith Butler describes gender as “the stylized repetition of acts through time”
(Butler 1988, 520). By renewing, revising, and consolidating a series of behaviors
over time, the body becomes its gender (Butler 1988, 523). Hence, gender is not
a stable social and cultural essence, but an emergent feature of humans engaging
with their worlds of meaning and sense. We recognize gender via the perfor-
mance of actions, gestures, costumes, mannerisms, and styles understood as ap-
propriate (sensible) to a particular historical situation.
This understanding of gender allows us to see the co-​creation and continuance
of self, world, and meaning. While in some sense, “acts” may be individuated such
that “one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s
200 Naturalism and Normativity

contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors,” “acts” are
always constrained by a historically proscribed set of action possibilities within
the social milieu, the gendered structure of social affordances (Butler 1988, 521).
Butler explains how the “gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corpo-
real space and enacts interpretations within confines of already existing directives”
(Butler 1988, 526). In performing gender, we are in turn performing, instantiating,
and enacting the gendered script that precedes us and yet requires our participa-
tion. Butler’s theory of performativity models that of theatrical drama:

The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has
been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which
has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make
use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and
reproduced as reality once again. (Butler 1988, 526)

This is not to say, however, that agency is lost and that the individual is a victim
of an overwhelming tide of cultural meaning and predetermination. We are not,
in Butler’s words, “a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-​given cultural relations” (Butler
1988, 526). We are not, in enactivist terms, merely heteronomous systems, but rather
relationally autonomous systems enacting our identity in precarious conditions.
While the environment limits sensible options, our enactment of proscribed choices
comes to effect—​that is, produce, constitute, and define—​the environment.

Subjective experience is not only structured by existing political arrangements,

but effects and structures those arrangements in turn. Feminist theory has
sought to understand the way in which systemic or pervasive political and
cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and
practices, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal situations is clarified
through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context. (Butler
1988, 522)

Hence, gender as a structuring feature of experience is shaped by value-​laden

individual acts of social expression. The gendered lifeworld, then, is not merely
a pregiven domain, but one that is brought forth as a relational domain of signif-
icance and valence to the ongoing adaptive activity of gendered body-​subjects.

Social Practices and Power

We instantiate social meaning through our reproduction of social scripts. To

extend the enactivist approach to explain the emergence of social meaning, we
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 201

could say that the interaction of selves and worlds results in a process of coordi-
nated sense-​making. However, to speak in terms of “participatory” sense-​making
here may now give the impression that we intentionally and autonomously create
or choose together the social worlds in which we live. Rather, our participation
is always constrained by both the kinds of environments into which we are born
and the process of enculturation that shapes our early lives and very sense of
self in these worlds. In situations of substantial power disparities within com-
munities, our social positioning greatly determines the extent to which we are
able to “participate” in the constitution of worlds by limiting opportunities and
affordances for well-​being. A question remains regarding the extent to which
we are capable of actively rewriting oppressive social scripts, and how, given the
often unconscious embodiment of meaning, this could effectively take place.
If enactivism is to be a valuable theory to explain human action, we must con-
sider the fact that the lifeworld of social relations does not exist on politically
or ethically benign terrain. Butler describes gender identity as a “performative
accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo” (Butler 1988, 520).
In the process of “becoming a woman” (à la Beauvoir), one must “compel the
body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become
a cultural sign to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited
possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project” (Butler
1988, 522). However, Butler dismisses this as a project through which one can
autonomously exercise her will. Rather, gender (or raced, classed, able-​bodied,
etc.) performance is better understood as a strategy, an attempt at viable conduct
in precarious conditions, which “better suggests the situation of duress under
which gender performance always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of
survival, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (Butler
1988, 522). While gender is not at all stable as a category of immutable or essen-
tialist meaning, it nevertheless exists as a “regulatory fiction” that dictates sen-
sible behavior and identity as well as social punishments and rewards based on
our performances of it. If we analyze worlds in terms of structures of significance,
valence, and affordance (Gibson 1979), we can see that the regulatory fictions of
gender operate like attractors in the dynamical structure of the social milieu. As
nutritive chemicals attract E. coli, the gendered lifeworld pulls us toward certain
normative constructions of gender.
Though gender exists as an emergent feature of social and cultural envir-
onments that lacks any essentialist foundations, its regulatory strength is
not to be underestimated. Indeed, while we cannot fully develop it here, a
feminist-​enactivist account of power will take as a central theme the power
to structure and restructure lifeworlds. That is, power in part operates
by shaping and constraining the landscape of significance, valence, and
affordance that constitutes the lived worlds of subjects. Gendered systems of
202 Naturalism and Normativity

power fundamentally structure the opportunities for perceiving, feeling, and

acting—​the very sense—​of human lifeworlds and the body-​subjects that co-​
constitute them. Just as an organism exercises its autonomy within “precarious
conditions” that can result in life or death, so too do individual persons make
gendered decisions that have real consequences for their survival, or, mini-
mally, their degree of flourishing, in environments that hold tightly to their
gendered norms. This is demonstrated by examples of how people who have
expressed nonconforming gender behavior have suffered harm, such as rid-
icule, social ostracism, loss of family, cultural exclusion, and even death, for
choosing to transgress gendered expectations.
One difficulty for challenging these social practices and inscribing more
liberatory practices is simply the difficulty of recognizing and interrupting our
ingrained behaviors. Social performances are often tacit and rarely serve as
objects of conscious reflection. As Mason-​Grant explains, “As familiarity grows,
self-​consciousness recedes” (Mason-​Grant 2004, 107). Indeed, this receding
seems to be a basic feature of incorporation. Evan Thompson and Mog Stapleton
point out that “environmental resources that are incorporated gain this transpar-
ency. They are no longer experienced as objects; rather the world is experienced
through them” (Thompson and Stapleton 2008, 29). This notion of familiarity
or transparency implies a level of skill or comfort in navigating a given environ-
ment. However, this ease will vary considerably depending upon one’s social
positioning. Social practices that are taken to be neutral, socially unproblem-
atic, and appropriate tend to be distributed along predictable axes of power, such
as those occupied by members of traditionally powerful gender, race, and class
groups. In Mason-​Grant’s words, “Privilege enables persons to live their lives as
socially unproblematic—​as morally neutral, normal, average, unremarkable—​
and to experience their agency as a ‘natural’ attribute rather than produced”
(Mason-​Grant 2004, 112). Predictably, embodied practices that are deemed
problematic, incite suspicion, or indicate inferiority are likely those exhibited
by members of less powerfully positioned genders, races, classes, and sexualities
within a given environment.
As María Lugones demonstrates, there can certainly exist a plurality of dif-
ferent “worlds,” or social environments, through which we travel and within
which we feel different levels of ease. When one is confident and “at ease in a
‘world,’ ” one may “know all the norms that there are to be followed . . . know
all the words that there are to be spoken . . . know all the moves” (Lugones, this
volume, 115). However, “There are ‘worlds’ we enter at our own risk, ‘worlds’ that
have agon, conquest, and arrogance as the main ingredients in their ethos. These
are ‘worlds’ that we enter out of necessity” (Lugones, this volume, 120). Within
these hostile worlds, we are not at ease and we have not perfected—​due to limi-
tations placed on access to such power—​the social know-​how that enables such
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 203

familiarity and viable conduct. The lives of those who fail to live up to the social
norms and expectations are much more difficult and are often marked by dom-
ination, Lugones remarks. The affordance structure of their physical and social
environments presents myriad obstacles to the exercise of agency and opportu-
nities to flourish.
A difficulty for underprivileged members of society is the embodiment of
their very own oppression—​that is, the re-​enactment of oppressive scripts that
continue to maintain the behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that limit one’s
opportunities. Diana Tietjens Meyers points out the possibility of a disconnect
opening in our mind-​body-​world enactment when the embodied values of
a society may be enacted despite rational rejection of said values, or disvalues
(Meyers 2004). Even though one may cognitively resist oppression, embodiment
may betray this belief by enacting oppressive practices. There are a number of
examples of this disconnect in our “psycho-​corporeal identity” in contemporary
feminist theory:

(1) Iris Marion Young observes that one can see embodied racism in individ-
uals who profess racial equality and yet “enact bigotry” in the presence of
people of color “by becoming jittery or by keeping their distance.” (Young
1990, 141–​142)
(2) Sandra Bartky points to women’s embodied inferiority: “By satisfying fem-
inine body norms, women homogenize their own looks, constrict their
own agency, and deprive themselves of the individuality and freedom that
full persons should enjoy.” (Bartky 1990, 71–​74)
(3) Lugones shows how we may enact stereotypes of ourselves when we enter
hostile “worlds”: “I may not accept [a given stereotype] as an account of
myself, a construction of myself. And yet, I may be animating such a con-
struction.” She continues, “indeed those who are oppressed animate op-
pressive constructions of themselves in the ‘worlds’ of their oppressors.”
(Lugones, this volume, 113–114, 122n.5)

In each case, women who believe in their own and others’ equality, strength, au-
tonomy, or playfulness may actually embody self-​loathing, inequality, and prej-
udice. This disconnect is a resultant feature of limited agency in participatory
sense-​making in a given environment or “world.” In these cases, despite a reflec-
tive and conscious endorsement of a particular set of beliefs and values, one’s
embodied comportment—​demonstrative of histories of interaction in a partic-
ular world of meaning—​continue to enact the disvalues of the environment. This
in turn negatively informs self-​identity, self-​understanding, and intersubjective
relationships, though sometimes in ways that are not transparent, that is, invis-
ible, to most.
204 Naturalism and Normativity

Though typically experienced as disturbing and emotionally taxing, such

tensions create the possibility for radical transformation. It may be extremely
difficult if not impossible for one who is “at ease” or privileged in an environ-
ment to notice problems brought forth by power differentials without advanced
powers of empathetic perception. However, for those who experience “outlaw
emotions,” fissures in psycho-​corporeal identity, or breaks in narrative construc-
tion, obstacles to well-​being are readily apparent—​affectively if not consciously
(Jaggar 1989). These emotional responses to embodied situatedness may be the
key to ignite catalysts for change and provoke movements for social justice.

The resonance of enactivism and feminist theory is apparent in the realization

that embodied selves, worlds, and meaning co-​emerge through their interac-
tion with one another. This dynamic co-​emergence is fundamentally embodied,
enactive, embedded, and affective. It is the product of the sense-​making of
living body-​subjects, and living body-​subjects are themselves constituted in and
through their physical and social environments. As such, many aspects of our
particular worlds of sense are merely contingent and, hence, open for change
and revision. As just one example, we have discussed how gender is merely
an emergent feature of the interactions of individuals in worlds of sense and
is constituted by the repetition of acts available within a particular historical
and social milieu. Despite the naturalizing tendency to correlate sex and gender,
there is nothing essential to our gender constructions and nothing holding so-
cial norms in place other than our policing of their performances. As Butler
describes, “Discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within
contemporary culture. . . . Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender
expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and
because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender,
and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (Butler 1999, 178).
A reclamation of embodiment and subjectivity involves changing the social
landscape—​including harmful values, enforced embodied practices, and in-
corporated oppressions—​that produce damaged subjects. While we typically
consider social change in terms of a modification of law or social policies, this
method is limited if not also accompanied by a concurrent change in embodied
attitudes and practices. In line with Meyers, we argue that “corporeally attuned
strategies are pivotal to emancipatory transformation” (Meyers 2004, 86). This
focus on corporeally attuned strategies, or, in the words of enactivism, embodied
and embedded strategies, is bolstered by our cross-​disciplinary analysis. The
enactivist analysis enables us to articulate forms of liberation from oppressive
sociocultural patterns in ways that go beyond merely envisioning such possibil-
ities to actualizing them. Social change needs also to be enacted at the ground
level—​in the embodied values, affective engagements, and activities we assume.
 Enactivism and Gender Performativity 205

Thus, recognizing the extent to which social meaning and value are encoded in
the body, that is, the way (even social) sense-​making is constitutively embodied,
can contribute to the emergence of new domains of truly participatory sense-​
making and flourishing.

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 11
Norms and Neuroscience
The Case of Borderline Personality Disorder
Anne J. Jacobson

In a recent retelling of an Aboriginal story, a creature emerges from a swamp

without any idea of what it is (Wagner and Brooks 1977). A platypus tells it
that it is a bunyip, but learning the word does not go far to answer the creature’s
questions about itself. The bunyip then discovers a scientist, a very busy one, who
without looking tells it that bunyips do not exist. Depression ensues until the
bunyip discovers another one just like it.
The bunyip’s encounter with the scientist might seem to capture a common
fear that many feminists have felt about the scientific gaze, a gaze still typically
male. Far from an insightful examination of how women function, the male sci-
entist may take himself as the model of the healthy human being, and then find
healthy women do not exist (Potter 2009; Wirth-​Cauchon 2001). Such a picture
of scientific psychology and psychiatry is of course an exaggeration, but there is
enough in it to lead many to expect a discussion of “borderline personality dis-
order” from a neuroscientific perspective is hardly likely to get much right.
The work in this chapter is motivated by a different set of expectations. Many of
us are unlike the bunyip in that descriptions of us are plentiful. Far from passing
through our environment scarcely described, many of us are told almost contin-
uously what we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. And, of course,
what we should be doing. These views may come both through explicit theories
and by seeming common sense, where the latter may encode partial and ques-
tionable views developed over a century or even over millennia. Cognitive neu-
roscience (CNS) is introducing alternatives to these views. Supposed common
sense on a wide range of topics is being challenged. The result is potentially very
liberating in allowing us to consider anew the nature of human thought and
action.
From the point of view of feminist philosophy, neuroscience itself, however,
has a challenge to meet, in addition to any raised by specific topics involving
particular mental characteristics. Neural systems appear to be socially isolated
items hidden inside our bodies. The picture of mental activity as separable from
embodied activity is itself the product of a view that has appealed to many as mere

Anne J. Jacobson, Norms and Neuroscience In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer
McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0012
208 Naturalism and Normativity

common sense; it is also enshrined in a great deal of philosophical theory largely

inherited from Descartes. Opposition to this view has a number of sources, but
feminist philosophy is clearly one of them.
The challenges CNS presents both to prevailing theories and to common sense
are relatively easy to describe. To situate such views within the picture of mentality
as embodied, including socially embodied, is a harder task. We will try to go some
distance with it. The account we arrive at places normativity at the center of cogni-
tive ontology, and it does so in a way that connects the ontology with social facts.
There will not be the space to investigate all the implications of the emerging view,
but there are connected theses both in my own work, referenced elsewhere in this
chapter, and in that of a number of other feminist writers, such as those appearing
in Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (Pitts-​Taylor 2016).

Borderline Personality Disorder and Its Problems

We will discuss some major problems arising from the notion of borderline per-
sonality disorder (BPD). The syndrome itself is problematic, as we are about to see.
Accordingly, we will use it principally as an example to discuss how neuroscience
can challenge a widespread interpretation of personality traits. If the neuroscience
we will look at is correct, then this chapter does have genuinely enlightening things
to say about the disorder. At the same time, we need to recognize that some excel-
lent theoreticians have doubts about the validity of the categorization.
Thus, though there is considerable agreement about what should be said to be
its major behavioral characteristics, very serious issues have been raised about
BPD’s legitimacy as a psychopathological category.1 ( I think the three most im-
portant concerns about it are: (a) the category pathologizes characteristics that
are really just socially acquired ways of negotiating one’s way through a limited
set of alternatives; (b) the category takes a possibly illusory idea of male excel-
lence and labels as ill those who do not present themselves as answering to it;
(c) BPD sufferers are actually difficult people and the use of the category reflects
a pervasive discomfort with difficult women.
We will start with behavior thought to typify BPD. BPD can involve rela-
tively unusual behaviors, some of which look very much like tantrums directed
to someone who is hardly deserving of such treatment. Consider this example
involving a psychiatrist who accompanied her patient to a meeting about the
results of removing cancerous material:

That day I went into the ob-​gyn’s office with her and sat across from the doctor
who reported great news that the patient was cancer-​free. . . . Out in the
hallway . . . my patient yelled and cried.
 Norms and Neuroscience 209

“You colluded with her! I can’t believe how you doctors were so self-​satisfied.
You didn’t even consider me. You and that doctor talked down to me like I was
a moron!”
. . . “I hate you both!” she screamed and ran down the hall. I dashed after her,
calling her name, but she jumped into an elevator and ran off. (Berman 2014)

Theorists, social critics, and psychotherapists who write about BPD tend to
agree that it is typified by a number of features, including some or all of the fol-
lowing: an unstable sense of self; a deficit in empathy; a fear of abandonment
and an inability to sustain relationships; risk taking and self-​harming; split-
ting or successively idealizing and damning individuals. There are sometimes
differences in emphasis, with the fragility in self accorded predominance in some
accounts and the destructiveness of relationships emphasized in others. These
two may be closely related, given the hypothesis we will see from CNS. Being
unable to share a social reality with others may have a profound effect on one’s
sense of self.
The internet in fact has many descriptions of BPD. The National Institute
of Mental Health provides us with a more fleshed-​out list of symptoms in the
following:

People with borderline personality disorder may experience extreme mood

swings and can display uncertainty about who they are. As a result, their
interests and values can change rapidly. Other symptoms include:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
A pattern of intense and unstable relationships with family, friends, and
loved ones, often swinging from extreme closeness and love (idealization)
to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation)
Distorted and unstable self-​image or sense of self
Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe
sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating
Recurring suicidal behaviors or threats or self-​harming behavior, such as
cutting
Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few
hours to a few days
Chronic feelings of emptiness
Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger
Having stress-​related paranoid thoughts
Having severe dissociative symptoms, such as feeling cut off from oneself,
observing oneself from outside the body, or losing touch with reality
Seemingly ordinary events may trigger symptoms. For example, people with
borderline personality disorder may feel angry and distressed over minor
210 Naturalism and Normativity

separations—​such as vacations, business trips, or sudden changes of

plans—​from people to whom they feel close. (National Institute of Mental
Health 2017)

From a feminist point of view, the typifying traits we have just seen can also easily
appear to be derived from a set of behaviors that many women, at least in the
West, arrive at as the best of a very narrow set of options allowed to them through
the restrictions of their society.2 In an environment where a women’s capacity
to rationally select among options is denigrated or denied, an emotional out-
burst may remain as the most effective instrument to influence others. When a
woman’s worth, including her very livelihood, depends on her relationships with
others, abandonment may indeed be greatly feared. Accordingly, a feminist may
well approach the use of BPD as a diagnosis with the expectation that it reflects
not some well-​grounded individual psychopathology but rather the negative
results of following the choices more or less forced on women.
We can add into the picture a commonly believed view of women failing to fit
a male model of stoic independence and cohesion. There has been quite a large
popular literature recently that has sought to ground the difference between men
and women in a difference between their brains (Brizendine 2006; Schulz 2005).
The differences in gender traits, however, are the ones which were accepted be-
fore much in brain science was generally available. Accordingly, men are stoic,
unemotional, analytic, ready to judge and punish others in terms of their adher-
ence to the society’s rules. Women, on the other hand, are emotional, helpful,
empathetic creatures who have scattered attention.
A similar picture can also be found in more professional literature. As in the
Gilligan-​Kolhberg disagreement, men are often said to be interested in justice
and rules, while women’s empathetic concern for caring for people keeps them
more focused on relationships with others (Gilligan 1982). According to one
major way of drawing the contrast, men are systematizers, capable of concen-
trating on one topic, but women tend not to have the capacity for a narrow focus
(Baron-​Cohen 2004).
Another but perhaps related problem arises when the BPD person enters
the clinical, diagnostic setting. Such settings can have features that are very dis-
tressing to clients with BPD. Susan Nyquist Potter gives an interesting account of
how a standard approach in much psychotherapy can provide an anger-​inducing
failure to recognize a client’s authenticity (Potter 2009). The negative demanding
reactions of someone with BPD in such cases may in fact be quite close to a re-
sponse from someone without that syndrome. The BPD patient, however, often
arouses very negative responses from therapists in such situations. Studies have
found that clinicians tend to impute the ability to have self-​control to BPD
patients in comparison with clients with other diagnoses and, then, blame them
 Norms and Neuroscience 211

for their behavior. Correspondingly, clinicians are less likely to be empathetic.

A patient may be difficult at the outset, but she may also become even more “dif-
ficult” in response to the reception she is getting.
The history of European society’s treatment of difficult women is not fortu-
nate. Both witches and hysterics can be seen as earlier examples of recipients
of the very adverse treatment difficult women can receive. We may indeed find
the foundations of psychiatry emerging with the institutionalizing of hysterics
(Gunn and Potter 2015).
From what we have seen, today’s BPD sufferer may differ from others in ways
significantly brought about by differences in environment. Those who object to
the BPD label on feminist social constructionist grounds may be starting from
just this point of view. A social constructionist account of some phenomenon
holds it is created by society and culture, as opposed to occurring independently
of the specifics of a culture’s beliefs and evaluations. It is important that social
constructionist accounts may vary according to whether they attribute any caus-
ally basic neural similarity beyond the behavioral syndrome created by society
(Haslanger 2012). In any case, a feminist version of the view will tend both to be
concerned with the effects of being labeled in terms of the phenomenon and to
emphasize the power relations involved in using the labels.
Accordingly, a feminist may well approach the use of BPD as a diagnosis
with the expectation that it reflects not some well-​grounded individual psycho-
pathology but rather the negative results of following the choices more or less
forced on women. And added to this is the failure of women to adopt a male dis-
play of independence and cohesion. We might, then, think that the unattractive-
ness of BPD is really in the eye of the beholder; as such, it is evidence of a social
creation.
Recent neuroscience, however, has provided an explanatory account of BPD
that challenges aspects of what we have just seen. One thing it does is to locate
a fundamental aspect of the disorder in the workings of the brain. As such, it
places BPD at the biologically grounded end of the socially constructed spec-
trum. Much in the clinical attitudes toward and treatment of BPD may be the
product of social values, but there is significantly more to it than just that.3

A Neuroscientific Approach

Feminist theorizing has historically displayed some antipathy toward CNS.

In large part this was due to the quite early claims that investigating the brain
showed why patriarchal divisions of labor were good and natural. Given that
the distinctions between men and women we saw above are often said now to
be the result of neurophysiological differences, this is a matter of important and
212 Naturalism and Normativity

continuing disagreement (Bluhm, Jacobson, and Maibom 2012; Fine 2010, 2005,
2017). In addition, CNS has been seen as offering reductive explanations that
dehumanize human characteristics. Nonetheless, there are also now attempts to
re-​understand a feminist, materialist perspective that engenders a more positive
approach to much in neuroscience (Pitts-​Taylor 2016). Accordingly, this chapter
provides a place for human values in determining the ontology of neuroscience;
the resulting view is quite different from the more traditional twentieth-​century
approaches.
The woman in the episode described near the opening of the previous sec-
tion seems highly sensitive to slights. At the same time, we might well think that
she cannot fully comprehend how hurtful her reaction to the therapist would
have been. But in fact CNS reverses this story (King-​Casas et al. 2008; Kagel and
Roth 2015). What we are learning is that those with BPD are deeply incapable of
establishing the cooperative relationships so many of us can easily do. And this
incapacity is due to a failure in a region of the brain.
In the relevant research, subjects were asked to participate in a well-​studied
“trust game” (Berg et al. 1995). A “trustee” and an “investor” successively give
each other some money. Success depends on trust and cooperation, including
being able to repair the trust if broken. The BPD subjects in particular could not
repair broken cooperation; very significantly, they could not read the signals that
the trustee sent to indicate mistakes on their part, while the trustees failed to be
able to form an adequate picture of the BPD subject’s thought processes.
The fundamental explanation of the failures comes from fMRI scans that re-
veal an asymmetrical reaction in one brain region, the anterior insula. The re-
search we are looking at indicates the insula is involved in reactions to norm
violations, both when the subject violates a norm and when the subject is the
target of a norm violation. According to the readings of the fMRI scans, the BPD
subjects were registering when they were violating norms, but they did not expe-
rience the norm-​violating negativity directed at them (King-​Casas et al. 2008).
This result is contrary to what clinicians and others ordinarily think is going on
with BPD subjects. That is the idea that BPD subjects are vulnerable people with
challenged egos who fly off the handle when they perceive a slight. It is much
more accurate to say that BPD subjects do not perceive slights. Rather, the source
of irritation must be something else, such as their sense that they are in an unin-
telligible situation.
This research can provide a systematic understanding of the concept of BPD
by our employing a rich account of concepts that enables us to articulate a struc-
ture for our concept of borderline personality disorder. The account, sometimes
called “the theory account” (Machery 2009; Murphy 2002), takes concepts of
kinds to refer both to recognition conditions and to an underlying metaphysi-
cally necessary cause of such conditions, or its essence. In such a case, the essence
 Norms and Neuroscience 213

of the illness is internal and asocial. But psychological illnesses are also impor-
tantly connected to aspects of the society in which their sufferers occur (Davies
2016). On such an account, BPD is not and cannot be purely dispositional.
Without any manifestations, there is no BPD.
Let us stress that human interests in BPD go vastly beyond anything like neural
conditions. BPD is in many ways a social phenomenon. Nonetheless, attending
to the neural basis of BPD means we need to revise our understanding of BPD.
Many have found it obvious that BPD reactions are overreactions to slights. It
may be more accurately thought of as a manifestation of a failure to understand
the social situation. But what we have missed out on previously goes beyond this
gap in our understanding. That is, we have missed out on the consequences of the
failure of the BPD sufferer to register negative reactions from others. That failure
means they do not share at all fully in the social reality of others and that they are,
or should be, themselves an enigma to those interacting with them.

Philosophical Objections

We will look at a particularly important objection to taking asymmetrical

reactions of the insula to constitute a metaphysically necessary cause of the ob-
servable symptoms of BPD. This objection comes from the insistence on a per-
sonal/​subpersonal distinction. Jennifer Hornsby and Daniel C. Dennett are early
advocates of it (Hornsby 2000; Dennett 1969; Drayson 2014).
The personal/​subpersonal distinction is sometimes presented as just the ob-
servation that properties of a whole person cannot be attributed to a proper
part of the person. For example, Jones believes, but Jones’s brain does not be-
lieve, even if Jones’s brain’s activity is thought to be the main site of belief-​related
neural activity. There are, however, too many cases where part-​whole boundaries
are not respected in the attribution of properties. Thus, if one says one is in pain,
the question “Where does it hurt?” is an invitation to locate the pain in a part of
the person even though being in pain is attributed to the person. In addition,
for a number of theorists, psychological states are to be understood in terms of
brain mechanisms, where descriptions of the contribution of the parts are very
important to our understanding of the grounding of the states. For such theories,
descriptions of the mechanisms can provide a complete characterization of the
psychological state. Hence, insisting on the distinction begs the question about
such theories.
A more seemingly solid version of the objection starts by saying that personal-​
level properties are often normative (Thornton 2013). But the level of neural facts
investigated by CNS is not normative, it is maintained, and so it cannot be ground
214 Naturalism and Normativity

or be essential to personal facts. Similarly, normative personal-​level properties

cannot be (partially) constitutive of most neural reactions, and vice versa.
We can see embodied mind theorists as developing another version of the
argument from the personal/​subpersonal distinction. For them the problem is
that subpersonal causal relationships are not going to add up to some personal-​
level phenomenon. I think we can agree in part with this point. For example,
one needs far more than asymmetrical activity in the insula to get the chaotic
relationships borderline persons characteristically have. But just as the biological
importance and the social implications of the existence of a human fetus do not
show it cannot be characterized on a cellular level, so it seems right to say that the
consequences of the asymmetrical activity do not show that the essence of BPD
cannot be a neural condition.

Normativity and Neuroscience

The question of levels and reduction is often envisaged as involving levels where,
as in Hume’s world, one little thing happens after another. The little things may
be at the atomic or neural level, but on this picture, the explanatory aim is to
uncover regularities and the laws that express them. A normatively neutral de-
scription in terms of mechanisms is presumably also possible (Chirimuuta 2014;
Craver and Darden 2013; Craver 2007). Instead of one little thing happening
after another, we have little things interacting with other little things, or parts of
them. Instead of laws, we have algorithms for interactions. Whether or not such a
picture fits physics, it drastically mischaracterizes CNS. CNS has an explanatory
task that is quite different. To see this, we can look at a norm-​neutral model of a
cognitive neuroscientific explanation:

But one sort of understanding that cognitive scientists are often interested in
achieving is analogous to the understanding that one would have of a clock if
one could identify each of its functional parts (its springs and cogwheels, its
pendulum, and so on), and the way in which all these parts interact to bring it
about that the clock has a reliable disposition to tell the correct time. . . .
An analogous understanding of how a computer works would involve an
understanding of the structure of its electrical circuits and of the logical struc-
ture of its programming code. If this is the sort of understanding that cognitive
science is particularly interested in, that would help to explain why cognitive
scientists are so interested in actually trying to build machines that can do some
of the things that minds can do. (Wedgwood 2006, 311)
 Norms and Neuroscience 215

It is important to see, nonetheless, that this description does not fit the goals of
CNS as actually practiced, and that it should not be true of it. CNS in general
does not aim simply to describe the mechanism of some subset of a kind of ob-
ject. Rather, it aims to describe what it is for objects of the kind to work well.
Similarly, a medical textbook may describe the internal workings of a kidney, but
it will be a well-​functioning kidney that is connected to other organs in the body.
The idea that examining the internal workings of a clock will help us under-
stand how it has the disposition to tell time has two large problems on its surface.
First of all, a clock ticking over may not have that disposition. Perhaps it runs fast
or slow, or perhaps its running is irregular or intermittent or both. Second, if you
decouple the watch from its environment and take it to another time zone, it can
stop telling the correct time without any internal change.
The clock example illustrates a major difference between typical philosoph-
ical aims and those of CNS. Philosophy is often interested in where the line
between, for example, seeing and not seeing is drawn. CNS, in contrast, is in-
terested in what it is to see well. The central task of CNS, as P. Read Montague
and Steven R. Quartz have pointed out, is to explain how a creature solves the
problems posed by its niche (Montague and Quartz 1999). Thus a neuroscien-
tist looking at the organs we employ in cognitive activities is looking at those
organs’ functions and how they perform those functions. Performing their
functions well will be part of what it is for the organism to solve the problems
posed by its niche.
So far we have a good argument for locating normativity in neuroscientific
explanations; neuroscience aims to describe what it is to function well. Still, one
might argue that this normativity is eliminable. We can just naturalize “function”
and so eliminate the normativity.
A discussion of naturalizing will take us on quite a detour. So here it will
have to suffice to challenge a major component of the majority of attempts to
naturalize functions. The outstanding naturalizing account for functions is the
selected effect account. On this view, functions of objects or traits are selected by
evolution. Functioning well is just then functioning as a trait or thing is selected
to function. And “selected” here may just mean that it is that functioning that
contributed to the trait or organism increasing its presence in a relevant popula-
tion. For this view, we can think of the items as having numerical success, which
is to be understood in factual terms as increasing its representation.
There is a problem with this view, however. The problem is that there are ways
of functioning that have come on the scene too recently for evolutionary success
to explain their presence. Among the late arrivers are ballet dancing, driving at
night, and reading.
Can the idea of a derived function developed by Ruth Garrett Millikan bring
such items under the “selected for” label (1984)? On this account, a function is
216 Naturalism and Normativity

derived from a primary, selected function if it is necessary in a context to realize

the primary function. There is a problem applying this solution to all the cases
just mentioned. In particular, reading requires, among other things, a rewiring
effected by cultural demands that creates new, nonevolved functions. Culture
changes the brain’s functions, as we are about to see.
Recent research on reading shows the unlikeliness of explaining reading
ability as a selected effect rather than a cultural object; learning to read involves
very substantially changing the inherited brain:

From a basic research point of view, working with illiterate people is also very
rewarding. Writing is a very recent cultural invention if we look at the evolu-
tionary history of our species. The first proper scripts were invented less than
6000 years ago. That means there is no reading area or reading network that
could be specified in our genes. Looking at how cultural inventions change
brain function and structures helps us to understand how the brain works on a
fundamental level.
. . . We found the expected changes in the cortex but we also observed
that the learning process leads to a reorganization that extends to deep brain
structures in the thalamus and the brainstem. The relatively young phenom-
enon of human literacy therefore changes brain regions that are very old in
evolutionary terms and already core parts of mice and other mammalian
brains.
. . . These deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem help our visual
cortex to filter important information from the flood of visual input even be-
fore we consciously perceive it. Interestingly, it seems that the more the signal
timings between the two brain regions are aligned, the better the reading cap-
abilities. (Skeide et al. 2017)

Learning to read progressively alters the ancient structure of the brain. Neither
the results needed for reading nor the original structures are or were selected by
evolution.
I have maintained that CNS’s interest in functioning is principally an interest
in functioning well. We still, however, lack an account of how to characterize
what functioning well amounts to. In addition, we need to situate BPD in this
latter part of our discussion.
If evolution does not give us the sense of “well-​functioning,” what does? Let
us start with ourselves and our judgments. Even the slightest knowledge of early
medicine reveals that the human species has long had complaints about bodily
functioning and symptoms of malfunctioning. We may quite dislike the way
things are going in some part of our body, or we may be quite pleased with other
 Norms and Neuroscience 217

areas. Certainly our understanding of the facts of well and poor functioning has
changed greatly, but it seems highly likely that well and poor functioning are to
be understood largely in terms of our interests. Some of these interests will be
so closely tied to our survival that they may be hard to see as simply interests.
Nonetheless, our evaluations of things like the reading abilities of people with
mild dyslexia, along with the social abilities of people on the autism spectrum
disorder, start to look like simply agreed-​upon interests, as many disability
theorists have argued (Barnes 2016).
Our account here comes close to a development of an account initially pro-
posed by Robert Cummins that draws on the idea that the function of some trait
is a matter of its causal contribution to the larger system of which it is a part
(1975). On the initial version a trait or thing will end up with a very large array
of functions, since it will be part of multiple systems. A more recent defense
holds that the effects that it is a thing’s function to produce are the effects for the
system that we are interested in. In this version, the account ceases to naturalize
functions, since “our interests” bring in both perspective and normativity. They
are a matter of what we think is important. Nonetheless, the account seems to fit
well with the conclusions our investigation has revealed.
When we see BPD as a disability, we can be reminded that a number of cul-
tural factors help shape the problematic positions its sufferers occupy. Our cul-
ture disdains difficult women, while many standard therapeutic features may
make the situation BPD patients encounter at least unfriendly. In addition,
our culture may encourage in women features that make them very prone to
possessing characteristics of BPD sufferers. However, there is a very serious un-
derlying problem that recent work in CNS has brought out. This is a failure to be
able to establish cooperative relationships. In social creatures such as ourselves,
this ability is close to the core abilities required for anything we might count as
fitness.
As we can see from the place of BPD as a disability, CNS may not solve all the
problems feminist theorists find in a classification of mental syndromes. What
was initially claimed for it has nonetheless been shown true: CNS can show up
new ways of thinking about the human mind that challenge approaches coming
from a mixture of supposed common sense and early psychological theorizing,
ones which are the product of and serve the aims of nonfeminist approaches. At
the very least, this feature of CNS can support feminist theorists in questioning
patriarchal views of women. It also opens up a harder task: discovering news
ways of thinking about ourselves.
218 Naturalism and Normativity

Notes

1. See, for example, Wirth-​Cauchon (2001), Friedel (2004), Sharp and Sieswerda (2013),
and Gunn and Potter (2015).
2. Until recently there has been wide agreement that a large majority of those diagnosed
with BPD are women; the figure is put at 75%–​90%. This view may, however, reflect
more accurately the fact that women are disproportionately more likely to be diag-
nosed as having BPD (Sansone and Sansone 2011).
3. The discussion in this chapter principally concerns CNS’s ability to introduce new and
possibly empirically more adequate accounts of various psychological traits. There are
a number of other examples where CNS makes available new interpretations. These
include the perception of affordances, our imitative capacities, and some types of im-
plicit bias. One consequence of this focus is that the discussion is orthogonal to other
recent considerations about normativity and mental illnesses, where the emphasis is
much more about whether psychopathological categories have scientific validity. The
interested reader can find an overview of this debate and an excellent bibliography in
Varga (2017).

References
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Fine, Cordelia. 2005. A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives. Crows
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 12
Embodiments of Sex and Gender
The Metaphors of Speaking Surfaces
Gabrielle Benette Jackson

Within feminist theory, embodiments of sex and gender may be explained dif-
ferently, depending on whether one takes a social constructivist or phenom-
enological approach. My aim in this chapter is to show that specific recurring
metaphors, used within both strains of feminist theorizing, carry an undue ideo-
logical weight. Time and again, we find sex and gender symbolically carved onto
the surfaces of bodies that figuratively speak a hegemonic text. I call these “the
metaphors of speaking surfaces.” I argue that these metaphors imply a conceptual
dichotomy wherein sex and gender are either the product of self-​willed personal
choice or the consequence of social forces imposed onto the individual from the
outside. This either/​or has been forcefully criticized in philosophy of mind and
phenomenology, and even targeted specifically on feminist grounds, as being
unable to capture the lived experience of agency. And yet it is found in feminist
theorizing about sex and gender, inadvertently let in through the metaphorics
of speaking surfaces, sometimes in the work of the very same theorists who dis-
parage this dichotomy in their other writings. Because metaphors shape and
influence our thinking, deploying a poorly chosen one can obscure the phenom-
enon it is meant to illuminate, and we set out trying to understand the wrong,
because displaced, thing. I contend that the metaphors of speaking surfaces have
this distorting effect in many feminist accounts of the embodiments of sex and
gender, and should be abandoned.
In this chapter, I have three goals. First, I must show that these metaphors
are the guiding metaphors within this important thread of feminist theorizing—​
as expressed in the works of Susan Bordo, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith
Butler. This is the exegetical project I take up in the first two sections of the
chapter: “Embodiments of Sex and Gender” and “Metaphors of Speaking
Surfaces.” My second goal is to argue that the metaphors of speaking surfaces
rest on a questionable dichotomy: that the sexed and gendered body is either in-
ternally chosen or externally constituted. I take this up in the third and fourth
sections of the chapter: “Interlude on Metaphors” and “Critique of Speaking
Surfaces.” Having identified these metaphors and drawn out their problematic

Gabrielle Benette Jackson, Embodiments of Sex and Gender In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0013
222 Naturalism and Normativity

consequences, I suggest a way to bypass both, which involves the project of pro-
ducing precise descriptions of the iterated patterns of bodily behaviors that con-
stitute sex and gender—​to theorize sexed and gendered bodies, literally, as they
are. This is the topic of the fifth section of the chapter: “Bodily Agency.”

Embodiments of Sex and Gender

To claim that sex and gender are socially constructed is to reject the view there
are innate or essential, fixed or inevitable traits determining what it is to be a boy
or girl, a woman or man, masculine or feminine, male or female.1 Instead, social
constructivists argue that the biological, physiological, behavioral, and psycho-
logical characteristics associated with these categories—​the basis upon which we
often identify and distinguish women from men, males from females—​are pro-
duced by the social forces of history, society, ideology, and culture. Importantly,
these dynamics have the added effect of managing the power relations among
the genders and sexes—​maintaining or even augmenting the status quo of who
has authority over whom, how this control is enforced, and in which spheres of
life that influence can be exerted. For those who believe in social construction,
the apparent reality of gender and sex is made and remade through material
practices, discourses, and power.
To offer a phenomenological analysis of sex and gender is to start from a dif-
ferent point—​treating a woman or man, or a male or female, as modes of being
in the world that, while not fundamental in themselves, are fundamentally man-
ifest in and through bodies. Phenomenologists disclose the patterns of bodily
behavior that produce sex and gender. When those practices are found to be
constraining, repressive, or oppressive, phenomenologists propose paths to lib-
eration by imagining how those performances might be reformed—​a phenome-
nological exercise put to feminist goals.
When the social constructivist and the phenomenologist focus their analyses
on bodily practices, they find that the embodiments of sex and gender are some-
times achieved by explicit decisions on the part of the individual, as would be fa-
miliar to anyone who has thought about whether to have children or breastfeed
(in public), what constitutes the best exercised body, what is appropriate work at-
tire or handshake firmness, whether an exchange at the office amounts to sexual
harassment, or what constitutes consent in a sexual encounter—​and then to act
on those deliberations. These accounts of sexed and gendered embodiments re-
mind us of how we choose to conform to gendered roles or sexed types, perhaps
giving us an opportunity to decide whether to go on with those practices. Here
one also finds analyses of bodily practices that question or subvert normative
iterations of sex and gender—​for example, as in Beauvoir’s descriptions in The
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 223

Second Sex of the lesbian and the liberated woman (Beauvoir 2011); discussions
of drag in Butler’s early work (Butler 1990); Anne Fausto-​Sterling’s presentation
of the five sexes (Fausto-​Sterling 1993); bell hooks’s accounts of black and brown
female embodiments (hooks 1982); Mary Russo’s history of the female grotesque
(Russo 1994); Kathy Davis’s interest in radical body art (Davis 1997); Nancy
Mair’s writing on disabled embodiment (Mair 1997); and in the many writings
on androgynous, genderqueer, and trans identities. In these works, subversion is
achieved through an act of concerted imagination, envisioning how the current
situation might be different, and then making it so, in practice.
And yet the embodiments of sex and gender are just as often tacitly manifested
through gestures and manners that have been drilled down, hidden, and
obscured by their location in the background of everyday life. Both the social
constructivist and phenomenologist contribute to our understanding of these
tacit manifestations of sex and gender, too. The emergence of sex and gender
can be surprisingly commonplace: for example, in Beauvoir’s descriptions of
the girl, the married woman, and the mother (Beauvoir 2011); in Iris Marion
Young’s account of athletic comportment (“throwing like a girl”) (Young 2005);
and Linda Alcoff ’s discussions of gender and race (Alcoff 2006). It emerges in
everyday practices: learned patterns of speech (like vocal fry and up-​speak), cus-
toms (crossing one’s legs, smiling at strangers), and even seemingly trivial habits,
as where one’s hand automatically reaches to button one’s shirt (if it is a woman’s
shirt, the buttons are on the right). In the case of tacit manifestations of sex and
gender, we do not realize the ways we enact these norms until we see them written
out before us—​enunciated in those careful descriptions of everyday gestures and
manners—​at which point we can entertain whether they help us abide, or keep
us from flourishing.
In feminist theorizing about embodiment, the relationship between social
constructivism and phenomenology is not a straightforward one. Many theorists
believe that these orientations can be quite distinct, as the explanations offered
do tend to diverge: with sex and gender either constructed through power re-
lations or expressed in bodily movements.2 And yet for both approaches, what
is under investigation is the same: the embodiments of gendered roles or sexed
types. And so is their goal: to understand the ways in which gendered roles and
sexed types are manifest in and through bodily practices, as possible objects of
biopower, by individual choices, and through the comportments of everyday life.

Metaphors of Speaking Surfaces

What exactly is the relation between the norms of gender and sex and bodily
practices? Looking at both the social constructivist and phenomenological
224 Naturalism and Normativity

literature, words like “produce,” “generate,” “manifest,” and “constitute” are re-
peatedly used. But how do feminists of embodiment theorize these terms? How
exactly are norms built into, or through, the body? When I looked deeper into
those texts for answers, I was surprised by what I found: metaphors. And very
particular metaphors at that.
Women’s bodies are “sites” where norms of femininity are “made explicit”; the
“surface” of the body “signifies” conventions by being “etched” or “inscribed” or
“written” upon; and even when the woman does not literally speak, the norms
figuratively “speak” for her or are “read” off her body.3 In my best approximation
of a survey, I have identified two related lines of metaphors:

(1) Bodies as Texts or Scripts: on this version of the metaphor, gender and sex
are “texts” that bodies involuntarily “speak” (as in “narrate”) and what they
“say” is “I am a woman” or “I am a man,” “I am female” or “I am male.”
(2) Bodies as Surfaces or Sites: on this version of the metaphor, gender and
sex are “etched” or “inscribed” or “written” on bodies that are “viewed” or
“read,” and what they “express” is “this is a woman” or “that is a man,” “this is
female” or “that is male.”

You can pick up book after book, I would suggest, and find these metaphors of
“speaking surfaces” in some form—​as in, for instance, Carrie Noland’s book,
Agency and Embodiment, where she writes that “it is now time to explore how
the body might speak to us—​not beyond but through cultural frames” (Noland
2009, 11); or Janet Wolf ’s words in Feminine Sentences, “the body [is] a privileged
site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and pos-
session” (Wolf 1990, 122); in Helena Michie’s claim in Flesh Made Word that “[the
word] ‘women,’ with verbs of passive alliance, remain inscribed in a patriarchical
grammar” (Michie 1987, 96). And one may remember Monique Wittig’s claim
in “The Mark of Gender” that “language casts sheaves of reality upon the social
body, stamping it and violently shaping it” (Wittig 1985, 4). A whole collection
of authors who readily reach for these metaphors can be found in Katie Conboy,
Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury’s 1997 edited volume entitled, not surpris-
ingly, Writing on the Body.
While, as I say, metaphors of speaking surfaces crop up again and again in
feminist texts, it is sometimes hard to say whether the authors who use them are
truly theoretically committed to these metaphors, or whether it is a mere matter
of style.4 I will now present three major authors in whose works the metaphorics
of speaking surfaces are used deliberately and repeatedly, with velocity: Susan
Bordo (social constructivist), Elizabeth Grosz (phenomenologist), and Judith
Butler (at times, both).
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 225

For Susan Bordo, in her excellent book Unbearable Weight, about female body
image and its disorders, the body is entirely a surface or site for writing, until
the moment that the written-​upon woman begins to suffer and explode into
overaction—​at which point the body “speaks,” even if the “words” are not the
woman’s own.
According to Bordo, young women learn to embody both the feminine and
masculine values of their time. But because these values are deeply incompat-
ible (because they are defined in opposition to one another, Bordo observes),
in certain women, for undetermined reasons, normal bodily practices collapse
into the pathological. Bordo writes that “the bodies of disordered women in
this way offer themselves as an aggressively graphic text for the interpreter—​a
text that insists, actually demands, that it be read as a cultural statement, a state-
ment about gender” (Bordo 1993, 169). The interpreter seems to be anyone who
notices the pathological phenomenon, like Bordo herself. In a major statement,
she writes:

In hysteria, agoraphobia and anorexia, then, the woman’s body may be viewed
as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed
starkly to view, through their inscription in extreme or hyperliteral form. They
are written, of course, in language of horrible suffering. It is as though these
bodies are speaking to us. (Bordo 1993, 174–​175)

But here, finally, in suffering, it is as if the woman’s agency comes into play—​
along with a particular idea of speaking, as “shouting”—​and thus giving a fake or
illusory feeling of power:

The language of femininity, when pushed to excess—​ when shouted and

asserted, when disruptive and demanding—​deconstructs into its opposite and
makes available to the woman an illusory experience of power previously for-
bidden to her in virtue of her gender. (Bordo 1993, 179)

For Bordo, the norms of femininity are “written” on the women’s body, like
them or not. And when the woman finally “reads” them aloud, as revealed by
her bodily behaviors, her “assertions” turn out to be only simulacra of language,
because they are understood only through the skein of her pathology. For ex-
ample, when the anorexic starves away her breasts, her body “says,” “I don’t
want breasts,” which her doctor “hears” as “I have a pathological relationship to
my body, and therefore to my gender.” There can be no uptake, as she intends.
Likewise, the anorexic’s ability to control her appetite, or to limit her caloric in-
take, her capacity to harm those who care about her, or to garner the concern of
226 Naturalism and Normativity

medical professionals—​these powers exist only within the circumscribed, insti-

tutionalized context of her disorder. She lacks real power.
Elizabeth Grosz’s metaphorics work differently from Bordo’s. In her remark-
able books Volatile Bodies and Space, Time and Perversion, Grosz too begins with
the image of bodies as “inscribed surfaces.” But she does not see the creation of
the sexed and gendered body through a turn to “speech.” Instead, she adds a di-
mension that analogizes corporeal modification of the physical body to a kind of
textual engraving:

This analogy between the body and a text remains a close one: the tools of body
engraving—​social, surgical, epistemic, disciplinary—​all mark, indeed con-
stitute, bodies in culturally specific ways; the writing instruments—​the pen,
stylus, spur, laser beam, clothing, diet, exercise—​function to incise the body’s
blank page. (Grosz 1995, 117)

Already Grosz’s preferred metaphor is that of the body as inscribed or carved,

which creates the effect of depth (however shallow) on what otherwise would be
a smooth surface. In her work we also find references to a Möbius strip (Grosz
1994, 36; Grosz 1995, 183) and intercalated surfaces that fold back onto them-
selves (Grosz 1993, 45–​46).5 Grosz’s construal of enfolding-​the-​body’s-​inscribed-​
upon-​page never overcomes the dichotomy of inside versus outside. Instead she
imagines an increasingly folded, padded, and textured surface, which produces
the illusion of interior. On her view, “the body is seen as a purely surface phe-
nomenon, a complex, multifaceted surface folded back on itself, exhibiting a cer-
tain torsion but nevertheless a flat plane whose incision or inscription produces
the (illusion or effect of) depth and interiority” (Grosz 1995, 116). For Grosz,
the body manifests sex and gender by being “carved upon”—​a decorated exte-
rior that, because twisted and folded onto itself, creates the (false) impression of
an interior. But no matter how many times you pleat, wrap, gather, or crumple a
page, it is still a “surface.” And without “depth,” everything is external.
Finally, there is Judith Butler. In many of her works, she seems to prepare us for
a more complex, less metaphorically determined description of bodily practices
that produce gender and sex. Butler announces, “gender operates as an act of
cultural inscription . . . and yet gender is not written on the body as the torturing
instrument of writing in Kafka’s ‘In The Penal Colony’ inscribes itself unintelli-
gibly on the flesh of the accused” (Butler 1990, 146). Butler seems genuinely to be
moving away from the metaphorics of text, speech, and writing. She adopts ideas
from Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-​Ponty: “gender is instituted through the
stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in
which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute
[this] illusion” (Butler 1988, 519). In Gender Trouble, she expands this assertion,
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 227

adding a bit of Michel Foucault to boot: “[Gender is] a set of repeated acts within
a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance
of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1990, 33). Even in other works,
Butler is clear that gender and sex are exercises of bodily skill: “a purposive and
appropriative set of acts, the acquisition of a skill” (Butler 1986, 36); and once
more, “a project, a skill, a pursuit, an enterprise, even an industry” (Butler 1989,
256). So far, so good.
And yet, in her key moments, and in some of her most famous further steps,
Butler abandons the possibly rich investigation into how bodily skills “pro-
duce,” “constitute,” or “institute” gender and sex. Instead, she reaches for the
metaphorics of language, albeit Austinian ordinary language, but to language
nonetheless, offering “performative utterances” (namely, “performativity”) as
her preferred metaphor for the bodily practices under scrutiny (Butler 1988,
1993). In explaining why she adopts this metaphor, Butler writes that “ ‘perfor-
mative’ itself carries the double-​meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-​referential’ ”
(Butler 1988, 522). The gendered and sexed body is “dramatic” in the sense that
it is played to an audience in a public space and “non-​referential” because it is
doing (as opposed to describing) something with words. Patterns of bodily be-
havior perform sex and gender in the same way that saying “I thee wed” in the
right circumstances performs marriage. Thus, for Butler, the gendered and sexed
body is performative not because it is nonlinguistic, but precisely because it
speaks—​in the sense given by ordinary language philosophy. In Undoing Gender,
Butler finally admits that, “every time I try to write about the body, the writing
ends up being about language” (Butler 2004a, 198). We are thrown back into the
metaphors of speaking surfaces in characterizing the embodiments of gender
and sex.

Interlude on Metaphors

A possible concern I must acknowledge before continuing is this: why do these

metaphors matter so much, since they are, after all, not explanations? This is quite
true. Metaphors are not explanations. But they do play an important role in our
understanding. Metaphors are found explicitly in art and literature, for certain.
And they actively operate in other areas, too—​for example, in analogical rea-
soning, concept formation, model building, perspective taking, and so forth. An
impressive amount of scholarship and debate turns on what metaphors are, how
they work, and what they do.6 All seem to agree that we run into trouble, how-
ever, when we misuse metaphors. What kind of trouble, exactly?
You could propose a danger of substitution for explanations: in some cases one
finds that, if we are not careful, a nicely chosen metaphor can give the illusion of
228 Naturalism and Normativity

an explanation. For instance, “the war on drugs” is a metaphor that is too often
taken literally, as a war (with a real enemy) requiring militarization, leading to
the misdirected marshaling of attention and resources. But this is just sloppiness
on our part. And I don’t think this is what is being done with the metaphors of
speaking surfaces.
The real hazard is that metaphors have the potential to model phenomena in-
accurately: a framing that then makes us look for the wrong kinds of explanation,
or explanations for the wrong—​because now slightly displaced—​phenomena.
Once this happens, we are too much misled to remember our original query, and
the details we fight hard to fill in about those phenomena are simply for things
that do not exist.
For instance, visual metaphors are found everywhere in philosophical
writing. Consider Thomas Nagel’s contribution: “the view from nowhere”
(Nagel 1986). We know full well that, taken literally, the view from nowhere is
no view at all. It is a metaphor for objectivity. For Nagel, an objective account
is one that does not privilege any one point of view. In a succinct statement,
Nagel explains, “the less it depends on specific subjective capacities—​the more
objective it is” (Nagel 1986, 5). The experiences of subjects, the perspectives
of individual people, and the standpoints of political groups cannot be objec-
tive because they necessarily, essentially involve points of view. Not that points
of view do not matter; for Nagel, they are inescapable. In reviewing The View
from Nowhere, Bernard Williams sums up Nagel’s view elegantly, if not vertig-
inously: “experience or thought is had from a certain point of view: the objec-
tive account is an account of that point of view which is not itself given from
that point of view” (Williams 1986, 5).
And here is where we get into the misuse of metaphors—​of potentially mod-
eling target phenomena incorrectly. Continuing with the example of “the view
from nowhere,” at the interface of philosophy of mind and feminism, we find a
host of feminists who argue that “the view from nowhere” models objectivity in-
correctly, even dangerously. For example, Catherine MacKinnon claims that this
kind of objectivity is objectifying because it offers (in disguise) an omnipresent
male gaze as the view from nowhere (MacKinnon 1983). Donna Haraway calls
the view from nowhere “an illusion, a god trick” that allows us to not be an-
swerable for what we see (Haraway 1988, 583). And Sandra Harding argues that
“strong objectivity” actually requires privileging certain (subaltern) standpoints
over other (hegemonic) ones (Harding 1993).7 My point is that if “the view from
nowhere” is a poorly chosen metaphor, modeling objectivity incorrectly (and
I am not saying whether it is), then contorting ourselves to understand Nagel’s
puzzle of “viewing the inside from the outside” is wasted intellectual energy at
best, and counterproductive to feminism at worst. The metaphors we use do
matter.
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 229

Again, my concern is not with mistaking metaphors for explanations. I have

to believe feminists are not making this error—​that they do not think women
are literal texts to be read, or actual surfaces on which to write. And I should
state here, too, that my concern is not with metaphors containing implicit marks
of patriarchy (of course, we should always be vigilant). Rather, my real worry is
about incorrectly modeling, and therefore misunderstanding, the embodiments
of sex and gender. That is, the metaphors of speaking surfaces may classify sex
and gender in a way that obscures a deeper, or at least different, analysis. Whether
social constructivist or phenomenological, feminists who address issues of sexed
and gendered embodiments rightly say, “Note the implications of patriarchy on
your bodies!” I would add, now, notice the implications of the metaphors offered
by these feminists.

Critique of Speaking Surfaces

By assuming the metaphors of speaking surfaces, feminists of embodiment are

displacing the target phenomena—​the embodiments of sex and gender—​and
thereby committing themselves to a misleading either/​or. Specifically, they pre-
serve the idea of bodily practices as controlled either internally or externally, an
assertion of an exclusive disjunction. They seem to reason that if gender and sex
do not emanate from “the inside” of the animate individual—​from a deep, core,
existential part of oneself, an innate spring of will, which authentically expresses
these traits—​then gender and sex must be surface phenomena imposed from
“the outside”—​by external historical, societal, ideological, or cultural forces. For
feminists of embodiment, overcoming the traditional oppressive story of an in-
ternal source of gender and sex (bursting forth, from the inside) involves con-
stituting sexed and gendered bodily practices externally (pressing down, from
the outside). We see their commitment to this reversal through the metaphors
of speaking surfaces: of bodies, ventriloquized by social forces, speaking or
shouting their gender and sex, of social forces writing or carving the body into
scripted gendered and sexed forms, publicly performed for the masses. Bordo,
Grosz, and Butler each have slightly different ways of doing this.
Bordo claims that gender and sex are pressed onto the body from the out-
side, leaving the host few resources with which to object, in rare cases, a turn
toward pathology. In her words, “a steady motif in the feminist literature on fe-
male disorder is that of pathology as embodied protest—​unconscious, inchoate,
and counterproductive protest without an effective language, voice, or politics,
but protest nonetheless” (Bordo 1993, 175). Here we might think that Bordo is
moving beyond metaphor by introducing embodied protest. Refusing to eat or
to digest, the symptoms of hysteria, frigidity, or generally garnering attention out
230 Naturalism and Normativity

of concern rather than admiration—​these seem like rebellions against the im-
possible norms of sexed and gendered embodiment. But, looking more closely,
we realize this is not an explanation of the structure of female disorder, it is just
another metaphor—​pathology as embodied protest. And an equivocal one at
that—​it is unclear what notion of pathology is supposed to emerge from this
comparison. Insofar as embodied protest is “unconscious, inchoate, and coun-
terproductive protest without an effective language, voice, or politics,” what
does it have in common with familiar forms of protest—​how could it be “pro-
test nonetheless” (Bordo 1993, 175)? And on behalf of whom exactly, or what, is
this protest carried out? Bordo leads us away, rather than toward, answers. Upon
reflection, pathology as embodied protest does not even seem like a good meta-
phor for the phenomenon Bordo so carefully, and concretely, describes. Because
we are the ones who “view” the norms “inscribed” on the female patient, her
body can “speak” and “protest,” but she cannot. She lacks genuine power. On her
account, the agent has disappeared.
Relatedly, Grosz relies on the distinction between inside and outside, even
as she focuses on enfolded surfaces. She writes that the body is “an open ma-
teriality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies and potentialities which may be
developed” (Grosz 1994, 190). When it comes to constructing gendered and
sexed bodies, however, “these are not individually or consciously chosen, nor are
they amenable to will or intentionality: they are more like bodily styles, habits,
practices” (Grosz 1994, 190). Here Grosz makes the interesting claim that the
body is equipped for a set of (possibly infinite) modes of life, and that the body is
ushered, through habit, into a set of (decidedly finite) gendered forms and sexed
types. But, in limiting the ways this development occurs, she too commits herself
to the dogma of either inside or outside. For Grosz, habits are not manifestations
of individual conscious choice, will, or intentionality. How could they be,
inscribed as they are onto an interior-​less, albeit enfolded, surface? Grosz leaves
us no choice: styles are taught, habits are imposed, practices carve into the body
from the outside. Once again, agency vanishes.
Butler makes a comparable move. Her early view that sex and gender are
patterns of repetitive bodily acts relies heavily on a phenomenologically rich no-
tion of action, including its “wider political and social structures” (Butler 1988,
523). She is explicit that “the body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as
if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-​given cultural relations” (Butler 1988,
526; emphasis added). And her notion of gender as a “pre-​reflective choice”
strikes an auspicious tone:

The choice to assume a certain kind of body, to live or wear one’s body a certain
way, implies a world of already established corporeal styles. To choose a gender
is to interpret received gender norms in a way that reproduces and organizes
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 231

them anew. Less a radical act of creation, gender is a tacit project to renew a cul-
tural history in one’s own corporeal terms. (Butler 2004b, 26)

But in key moments like these, we find Butler advancing the metaphor of bodies
that perform cultural codes. Where we might have hoped to find action, we find
instead actors. She writes, “just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and
just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts
its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space” (Butler 1988, 526). The col-
lective historical, societal, ideological, or cultural elements are, once again, the
scripts that construct norms from outside. For Butler, the sexed and gendered
body is not written upon or inscribed, it is scripted, delivering (“once more,
with feeling”) the lines of a text that the agent did not write herself. If there is
agency on Butler’s view, then it is the highly circumscribed agency of an actor
performing a play.
To be absolutely clear, the problem with these analyses of sex and gender,
which I am not the first to identify, is the apparent evaporation of individual
agency. This is, in part, what critiques by Simone de Beauvior (2009), Sandra
Bartky (1990), Toril Moi (1999), Iris Marion Young (2005), even Judith Butler
herself (1988), and other phenomenologically oriented feminists are aiming
at—​that accounts of social construction run the risk of sacrificing the lived
experience of women for an increasingly abstract tale of sex and gender. Upon
taking agency out of the picture, but without introducing some revised notion
of action (or alternative to it), the patterns of bodily behavior that constitute
gender and sex come to be no different than biological mechanism (for ex-
ample, the so-​called female brain). It hardly matters whether these processes
reside literally inside or outside the skin; they will still be external to the agent
herself, and in particular, outside any lived experience, for her, of action.
To put it another way, even if we grant that the norms of gender and sex are
formed by social forces operating outside of the gendered and sexed body,
they still must be embodied—​that is, lived by someone who experiences her
body as gendered or sexed—​otherwise these norms would have no meaning.
And yet they do. Gender and sex are meaningful to us because we live them, as
both extensions of and impediments to our agency—​empowering, alienating,
frustrating, liberating, oppressive.
At this point, however, we should not be tempted to reinstate the idea that
sex and gender emanate from the inside just to capture the lived experiences of
those who embody them—​to make the pendulum swing back once more. The
phenomenologist is in trouble, too. I suspect this is a source of the anxiety articu-
lated by the social constructivists, who see problems with phenomenological ac-
counts of sex and gender that refocus on experience, because experience (though
now lived) is still understood as internal, private, privileged, and ultimately
232 Naturalism and Normativity

incorrigible. And experience, so understood, would seem to evade the scope of

social construction.

Bodily Agency

How does one overcome the false dichotomy of either internal or external in
explaining the embodiments of sex and gender? I want to suggest something that
all involved parties acknowledge, while still seeming to miss the deeper point.
A third term is required. What must be theorized is neither body practice nor
lived experience but instead bodily agency. Allow me to explain.
One central idea behind the mid-​twentieth-​century reorientation toward
the body in Western philosophy—​as found in phenomenology, behaviorism,
and pragmatism—​is that the body itself can manifest agency, without being
the instrument of a self-​enclosed conscious will or the product of sociohis-
torical institutions.8 In my own research, I call this notion “bodily agency”
(Jackson 2018). Similar views can be found in the feminist literature as well,
notably in the work of Sara Heinämaa (2003).9 It involves the idea that par-
ticular kinds of bodily behavior—​like skills and habits—​comprise a meta-
stable unity of solicitation and projection. That is, bodily agency involves the
dynamic looping of two processes: the body entertaining certain patterns of
behaviors called for by a situation while at the same time the body conjuring
a situation that calls for certain patterns of behaviors.10 Bodily agency finds
a dynamic balance being pulled and resisting the social milieu, within one
and the same action. In instances where there is just an internal intention
to behave, or where only social forces control behavior, there is no bodily
agency of the sort I am describing because these instances preserve the in-
ternal versus external dichotomy that the notion of bodily agency is meant to
overcome.
I want to say that the embodiments of sex and gender are not created from
the outside by writing, inscribing, or performing a script—​as in Bordo’s “writing
the female body,” Grosz’s “corporeal inscription,” or Butler’s “performance of a
normative script.” But they are certainly not generated by the springing forth of
some eternal femininity or masculinity, some innate maleness or femaleness—​
from the inside. Instead, they are enacted through bodily agency. The bodily
practices that comprise gender and sex feel like doings, not happenings, experi-
enceable through the body, but also within the realm of volition, even if they are
proffered by culture. And the reason is, I am hypothesizing, because the bodily
practices that constitute gender and sex involve a double process—​the power to
project and the power to be solicited—​that is united in and through the body.
Social norms might circumscribe the limits for manifesting female or male, man
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 233

or woman. But these norms are nothing more than bodily solicitations that must
be taken up by an agent. They must be enacted, not in the sense of choosing to
act, or even in the Butlerian sense of performing a script, but in the sense of the
body’s projecting an existing social milieu, and, when revolution is possible, con-
juring a new one. And while the feminists I have discussed here may well agree
with this view, their choices of metaphors work against it—​insofar as sex and
gender are carved, inscribed, read, and scripted, the bodies that manifest them
can only be surfaces without depth, mere bodies without agency of their own.
Feminists of embodiment embrace the idea that gendered and sexed bodies
are shaped by the social forces of history, society, ideology, and culture. But how
exactly do these social forces form bodily behavior into regular arrangements
that follow in discernible sequences, creating the conspicuous affinities that are
intelligible as feminine or masculine, female or male?
I have argued that in the place of an answer to this question, currently, there are
metaphors, and that the metaphors of speaking surfaces preferred by feminists of
embodiment are linked to an unfortunate dichotomy of internal choice versus
external control. In order to bring the experience of agency back into the pic-
ture, I insist that the metaphors of speaking surfaces, and the binarism they
rely on, should be abandoned. What is needed is an account of bodily agency,
a personal-​level phenomenon, where the powers of history and culture press
bodies into gendered roles and sexed types and bodies respond by accepting
or rejecting these demands, by uniting the elements of bodily solicitation and
bodily projection.
It might come to seem, at this point, that I am endorsing a departure from
metaphor in favor of precise descriptions of embodied practices, from which
the structures of sex and gender may be revealed. This is true. But because
metaphors help us to understand complex phenomena that we cannot grasp
directly—​expanding our cognitive perspectives, enhancing our expressive re-
sources, and in some rare cases enabling the discovery of new properties—​
their pragmatic value should not be ignored. Thus, there are questions that my
proposal raises but does not answer: What is it like to conform to or deviate
from the norms of sex and gender, such that we understand (explicitly or tac-
itly) where we are in relation to them? How are those experiences different
from, say, discovering the optimal distance from which to view a painting or
finding a compassionate response to a partner in crisis? How do we experi-
ence the judgments of others in our conformation or deviation from sexed and
gendered norms, and how do they nudge our practices? How do sexed and
gendered embodiments create distinctions among people? In answering these
questions, we may still need the figurative resources of bodily agency—​for ex-
ample, the blind habits, the tangled practices, the revolutionary improvisations;
even the important notion of the background is, to some degree, metaphorical.
234 Naturalism and Normativity

Perhaps, then, I am not advocating a complete move away from metaphors.

But I do recommend that we first try to understand what sexed and gen-
dered embodiments are really like, in greater detail, to uncover any logics or
structures that may underlie, connect, or distinguish them, before once again
resorting to metaphorical abstractions.

Notes

1. Sex and gender are normative categories that have been complicated in recent
decades. In this chapter, I use terms like “masculine” and “feminine,” “female” and
“male,” but I do not believe they designate natural (or even social) kinds.
2. The edited volume Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray explores the sim-
ilarities and differences of these approaches to embodiment (Parker and van
Leeuwen 2018).
3. These metaphors already exist, for example, in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche,
Franz Kafka, and Michel Foucault, as when Foucault writes, “the body is the inscribed
surface of events” (Foucault 1984, 83). For my purposes here, I am less interested in
the ultimate origin of these metaphors than I am in their current use and mobiliza-
tion in feminist thought.
4. I have discovered two authors—​Margaret McLaren (2002) and Pippa Brush (1998)—​
who acknowledge the prevalence the metaphors of speaking surfaces, although these
theorists embrace the metaphors without much concern.
5. Grosz discusses “enfolding” primarily as a development of ideas from Maurice
Merleau-​Ponty’s essay “The Intertwining—​the Chiasm” (published as the climactic
chapter in The Visible and the Invisible [Merleau-​Ponty 1964]). But she does so with
some trepidation. Merleau-​Ponty’s oeuvre is controversial in feminist theory, being
criticized for, among other things, assuming he was theorizing all bodies when in fact
he may have been theorizing masculine conceptions of male bodies (see Butler, this
volume; Irigaray 1993; Grosz 1993; Le Dœuff 2003).
6. See, for example, Black (1962), Davidson (1978), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Kittay
(1987), Grice (1989), Derrida (1982), Ricoeur (1993).
7. Debates about source and value of visual metaphors generally form a fascinating cat-
egory of feminist critique. See Mulvey (1975), Keller and Grontkowski (1983), and
Code (1991). Other curious examples of visual symbolism that have been subject to
scrutiny are these: the mind as camera obscura, seeing as believing, bias as blind spot,
the (male) gaze as penetrating.
8. For an example from phenomenology, Edmund Husserl and Merleau-​Ponty; from
behaviorism, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle; from pragmatism, John Dewey.
9. See also Burke (2013), Stoller (2014), and Weiss (2002).
10. Both Grosz and Butler come close to capturing this metastable unity. They each rec-
ognize the aspect of bodily agency associated with solicitation. But I can find no place
where the feature of bodily agency associated with projection fits into their picture of
gendered roles and sexed types.
 Embodiments of Sex and Gender 235

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Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
 PART IV
B ODY A N D M I ND
 13
Against Physicalism
Naomi Scheman

When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory,

I know that I will have to do lots of acrobatics—​like a contortionist or
tight-​rope walker—​to have this theory speak to me without allowing
the theory to distort me in my complexity.
—​María Lugones1

For most contemporary analytic philosophers, the physical sciences are the lode-
stone both for epistemology and for ontology; other ways of knowing and other
ways of saying what there is have somehow to be squared with what physics might
come to say.2 In the philosophy of mind, central problems arise from the difficul-
ties in accounting for the phenomena of consciousness (in Thomas Nagel’s terms
“what it’s like to be” a subject of experience), and from the apparent intractability
(compared, say, to chemistry or even biology) of psychological explanations.
This sense that—​both ontologically and epistemologically—​something distinc-
tively mental would be unaccounted for, after physics had accounted for every-
thing it could, has often been taken to motivate dualism: the mental is left over
after the physical is accounted for just as (though, of course, not nearly so un-
problematically) the forks are left over after the spoons are accounted for.
Feminists have been critical of dualism in part for its implicit if not explicit
privileging of the mind over the body and for the misunderstanding of each that
results from their being prised apart. Such criticisms remain apt, as Susan James
argues, even in relation to accounts that, while metaphysically nondualist,
nonetheless continue to prise the mental apart from the physical, by abstracting
such phenomena as memory from their attachment to (better: their realization
in) specific, socially embedded bodies (James, this volume). But if dualism has
been unappealing to feminists, its usual alternative—​physicalism—​has seemed
to many an unpalatable alternative, in large measure because the sort of atten-
tion to bodies that, for example, James encourages is not the attention of the
scientist to an object of study, but the attention of a subject to her or his own
experience, as well as the attention of diversely engaged others.3

Naomi Scheman, Against Physicalism In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0014
240 Body and Mind

Feminists’ work on topics such as the emotions, the nature of the self and of
personal identity, and the relations between minds and bodies can seem irrele-
vant to the issues that concern physicalists: the starting points, the puzzles and
perplexities that call for theorizing, seem quite different. I want to argue that the
appearance of irrelevance is misleading: while it is true that feminist theorists are
asking different questions and thereby avoiding direct answers to the questions
posed in the literature around physicalism, the reorientation of attention char-
acteristic of the feminist questions usefully reframes the problems that vex
that literature—​problems of accounting for ourselves as physical beings in the
world. In particular, what comes to be crucial in accounting for psychological
explanation are the ways in which such explanations are irreducibly social, a
“problem” to which dualism is an entirely irrelevant response. Understanding
our emotions, beliefs, attitudes, desires, intentions, and the like (including how it
is that they can cause and be caused by happenings in the physical world) is akin
to understanding families, universities, wars, elections, economies, and religious
schisms: positing some special sort of substance out of which such things are
made would hardly help, nor does it seem metaphysically spooky that there is
no way, even in principle, of specifying, on the level of physics, just what they are
made of. (The university buildings count, but what about the dirt on their floors?
If we count the faculty, do we count the food in their stomachs?)
Consider the performance of a piece of music. There is nothing going on
in addition to the physical movements of the bodies of the members of the or-
chestra, but there is no way, appealing just to physics, to specify which of those
movements are parts of the complex event that is the performance and which
are not. What is and is not part of the event has to do with what sort of thing a
performance is, what norms and expectations determine what its parts are. For
example, the first violinist’s coughing is not typically part of the performance, but
it certainly can be—​if, for example, it’s written into the score. When it comes to
identifying the performance as a cause, there are two very different possibilities.
To say, for example, that the performance caused a crack in the ceiling is to say
that there are physical events more or less loosely associated with the perfor-
mance that caused the cracking, but the performance per se is not among them
(that certain sounds are part of the performance is irrelevant to whether they
contributed to causing the crack). If, by contrast, as with the premiere in Paris
of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, the performance caused a riot, its being a
musical performance (something about which the audience had certain expec-
tations) is crucial: in this case the performance per se was the cause, but not as
a physical event, since it is not one. To say that a performance is not a physical
event is not to embrace some odd form of dualism; it is to acknowledge that,
from the perspective of physics, the performance is not a particular complex
event—​one whose (physical) cause and effects we can inquire into—​but rather
 Against Physicalism 241

an inchoate jumble of events. Performances are “socially constructed,” meaning

that their integrity as particulars is dependent on sets of social practices that
make them meaningful wholes.
It is not, of course, at all clear how to relate social explanations to physical
ones: the relationships between the social and physical sciences are deeply vexed.
But the problems are importantly different from those that have engaged the phi-
losophy of mind, less likely to provoke the a prioristic metaphysical demands that
characterize the discussions of physicalism, however empirical those discussions
are meant to be. What I want to suggest is this: in explaining ourselves to our-
selves and to each other we allude to such things as beliefs, intentions, emotions,
desires and attitudes. Physicalism consists in the claim (specified and argued for
in a wide range of very different ways) that, insofar as these explanations are true,
the events, states, and processes to which they refer must be identical with or
somehow dependent upon or determined by events, states, and processes in or
of the body of the person to whom they are attributed. Such a claim is neither
required for nor supported by empirical research that shows how it is that, for
example, emotional responses are related to changes in brain chemistry. Surely
how we act and feel has enormously to do with what goes on in our bodies, but
recognizing that fact no more supports the claims of physicalists than recog-
nizing the importance of physiology to the carrying out of the actions that con-
stitute a performance or a riot would support the claim that physiology explains
why the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps caused a riot. The performance as
such does not survive abstraction from social context, and neither do its causal
powers: its “realness” and its causal efficacy are dependent in part on its being
the socially meaningful type of thing that it is. Similarly, I will argue, beliefs,
desires, emotions, and other phenomena of our mental lives are the particulars
that they are because they are socially meaningful, and when they figure as those
particulars in causal accounts, neither those accounts nor the phenomena that
figure in them survive abstraction from social context.
Most of those working in the philosophy of mind today subscribe to one or
another of the dizzyingly many varieties of physicalism. They share a demand
for the mental to be composed of, or determined by, the physical—​however dif-
ferently they work out the details—​in some way that attributes to mental phe-
nomena not only continuity with the physical but also the sort of reality that
the physical is presumed to have, including independence from our practices
of noticing and naming. The failure of such independence, the possibility that
much of what we talk about when we talk about our mental lives—​our beliefs,
emotions, desires, attitudes, intentions, and such—​does not exist as determinate
physical “somethings,” is thought to undermine the possibility of taking such talk
seriously, of taking it to be part of a true account of what there is in the world. It is
here that feminist discussions both in the philosophy of mind and in seemingly
242 Body and Mind

remote areas can shed light, since they lead us to see the importance and the pos-
sibility of holding on both to the idea that our mental lives are constituted in part
by the ways we collectively talk and think about them, and to the idea that such
talking and thinking are not arbitrary and that the realm of the mental is no less
real for being in this sense “made up.”
Disputes among feminist theorists frequently take the following
form: theorists of type A argue against the appeal to absolute standards of
truth or rightness that exist in abstraction from our lives and practices, on the
grounds that such appeals reflect a suspicion of plurality and diversity and a
disdain for that which is local, particular, contextual, contingent, embedded,
and embodied; while theorists of type B argue for the importance of standards
of truth or rightness that are independent of what people happen to do or
say, on the grounds that what most people happen to do and say—​expert
discourses and common sense alike—​is prone to sexist and other forms of
bias, and that we need a more compelling response than simply that we don’t
like it. Thus arise the debates between universalists and particularists in
ethics, essentialists and social constructionists in gender and sexuality theory,
empiricists and postmodernists in philosophy of science, objectivists and
relativists in epistemology. The tendentious nature of all those labels reflects
the divisiveness of the disputes, a divisiveness that obscures the fact that for
many of us the disputes are internal to any position we might occupy. They
are, I want to suggest, better thought of as necessary tensions, as reminders of
the theoretical and political importance both of attention to diversity and par-
ticularity and of nonarbitrary, rationally defensible justification.4
One way of characterizing the disputes is as between the suspicion of and the
demand for some special kind of thing, which answers to our needs precisely by
being independent of them, by being what it is—​Reality or the Good, the essence
of something or the measure of an argument—​no matter what we might think
or do. Such disputes are not, of course, peculiar to feminist theory: they are ar-
guably at the heart of the problems of modern philosophy, where, however, they
tend to be treated as purely intellectual puzzles. In their feminist articulations,
they reanimate the very practical urgency that gave birth to them—​in the tur-
moil of early modernity, out of the need to ground the claims to truth and right-
ness being made by upstart rebels against the prevailing standards of a theocratic
and aristocratic social order. As part of those struggles it was necessary to articu-
late new conceptions of the nature of persons and their states, the subject matter
of the philosophy of mind. Feminist perspectives at this late stage of modernity
throw into relief the historical specificity of those projects of articulation—​for
example, the field-​defining epic struggle between the self as subject of inner ex-
perience, abstracted from the surrounding world (even, supposedly, from its
own body), and the body as object of scientific scrutiny.
 Against Physicalism 243

Feminist perspectives shift attention to understanding persons as both bodily

and social, and knowledge as interpersonal and interactive. Physicalism then
appears not so much false as empty: ontologically, it puzzles over how to establish
a relationship—​whether of identity or of some form of supervenience—​between
what ought not to have been analytically distinguished in the first place; and epis-
temologically, it concedes to (a philosopher’s fantasy of) physics a dominating
role even over explanatory schemes explicitly being argued to be nonreducible
to it. To reject physicalism is not, as Wittgenstein says, to deny anything—​not
anything, that is, by way of actual investigation into or explanation of how our
experienced lives are shaped by our being the bodies that we are. What is denied
is the demand that such explanations have either to underwrite or to supplant the
accounts of those lives that rest on appeal to the social practices and norms that
make us the persons that we are.

The Demands of Physicalism

Jennifer Hornsby, in a series of articles going back to 1980 and collected in her
book Simple Mindedness, argues against the ontological foundations of physi-
calist theses. One of the central targets of these arguments is what she identifies
as “mereological conceptions” of the objects in an ontology, according to which
relatively big objects can be identified with the unique “fusion” of the smaller
objects—​their parts—​which make them up (Hornsby 1997, 48–​49). John Dupré
similarly identifies mereological conceptions as at the heart of what he finds
problematic about physicalism (or any requirement of a unified account of di-
verse phenomena) (Dupré 1993, 91–​94). Both these authors see themselves as
blocking at some very early stage a frequently unvoiced argumentative move that
not only licenses a range of diverse positions but frames the arguments between
them. Such a move, if noticed at all, can seem obvious, unavoidable: avoiding it
can seem like being committed to something like a soul, a mysterious addition
to the physical stuff that constitutes the goings-​on in and of our bodies (Dupré
1993, 90; Hornsby 1997, 12).
Supervenience theses most explicitly mobilize this picture, since, unlike other
physicalist theses, they typically are mute about actual explanation and insistent
on what are taken to be the requirements on the possibility of any explanations at
all. Consider the following:

We think of the world around us not as a mere assemblage of objects, events,

and facts, but as constituting a system, something that shows structure, and
whose constituents are connected with one another in significant ways. . . .
Central to this idea of interconnectedness of things is a notion of dependence
244 Body and Mind

(or its converse, determination): things are connected with one another in
that whether something exists, or what properties it has, is dependent on, or
determined by, what other things exist and what kinds of things they are. . . .
Activities like explanation, prediction, and control would make little sense for
a world devoid of such connections. The idea that “real connections” exist and
the idea that the world is intelligible and controllable are arguably an equivalent
idea. (Kim 1993, 53)

This paragraph is the start of an essay in which Jaegwon Kim lays out a range of
supervenience theses. He goes on to argue for the strongest among them, on the
grounds that only it can meet the demands he lays out here. The demands them-
selves, however, are widely accepted among physicalists, including those who be-
lieve they can be met by some form of nonreductive supervenience, much weaker
than the reductionism Kim promotes. The paragraph perfectly accomplishes the
slide from saying something quite ordinary to being in the grip of a picture, one
that leads us to lay down requirements on what the world, or our accounts of
the world, must be like.5 The argument is a transcendental one: given that ex-
planation is possible, what must be the case? The appeal is to (what is taken to
be) explanation per se, not to the details of particular explanations or explana-
tory practices. Later in the same essay, in fact, Kim explicitly argues for the im-
portance of separating metaphysical from epistemological considerations: the
mental can be said to be determined by the physical whether or not we ever could
be in a position to provide the explanations that determinacy underwrites (Kim
1993, 175–​176) The picture (and on this point there is wide agreement with Kim)
is that physicalism provides the ontological grounds for the possibility of mental
explanations, however autonomous or irreducible such explanations might be
argued to be.
A linchpin of Kim’s arguments to the conclusion that attempts at nonreductive
supervenience are doomed is what he calls the principle of “causal closure”: “If
we trace the causal ancestry of a physical event, we need never go outside the
physical domain” (Kim 1993, 280). Davidson and Fodor, among many others,
explicitly commit themselves to essentially this principle (though they disa-
gree with Kim as to its consequences), and it is one Hornsby and Dupré, among
others, have challenged. I am persuaded by those challenges, but want, for the
purpose of this chapter, largely to bracket that issue and focus instead on the
question of ontology. In the passage quoted from Kim, he refers repeatedly to
“things,” as in “things that happen,” and at the start of the passage he refers to
“objects, events, and facts.” For his argument to work, such “things” need to be
related in ways that exhibit structure: they depend on and determine each other;
their “real connections” are what make the world intelligible.6 One of my central
arguments is that taking commonsense psychology seriously is to be committed
 Against Physicalism 245

not to a theoretically vexing ontology of objects (mental events, states, and pro-
cesses), but rather to practices, explanation among them, and to the nuances of
our lives as shaped and made intelligible through those practices.
For Kim, as for some others, notably Davidson, the “things” in question are
preeminently events, and there are long arguments between them and others
as to what it is that events are. Beyond those arguments lies an even murkier
ontological swamp—​the “states and processes” that usually get appended to the
list of mental phenomena. Any physicalist theory is going to have to say some-
thing about the ontology of swamp-​dwellers—​something that provides a way, in
theory at least, of individuating the contents of the swamp independently of the
norm-​laden, interpretive social practices that characterize commonsense psy-
chology. Those “things” have to be individuated in ways that suit their role in the
properly physical causal accounts in which they are thought to have to figure if
common sense is to be scientifically vindicated. Issues about individuation often
slip by, as “the initial move in the conjuring trick,” the assumption that mental
events, states, and processes are particulars whose nature can be investigated: we
can ask what they are, whether they are identical with or constituted by physical
events, states, and processes, and how they enter into causal relationships.
When Robert Wilson, in a careful and detailed account of individualism in the
philosophy of mind, says that anti-​individualist arguments have concerned tax-
onomic rather than instantial individuation, he is, I think, right. Wilson suggests
that one cannot ask whether A is the same as B (a question of instantial indi-
viduation) without asking what sorts of things A and B are taken to be (a taxo-
nomic question) (Wilson 1995, 21–​25). Davidson’s anomalous monism exploits
the idea that the framework of space-​time can provide for material objects, and
the framework of causation can provide for events, a way of individuating that
doesn’t depend on any finer taxonomizing (Davidson 1980). That solution is,
however, ultimately question-​begging in its assumption that, in particular in the
case of events, the presumptively closed and complete system of physical causa-
tion individuates all the events that there are.7 As my example of the performance
was meant to suggest, this assumption is deeply problematic, amounting to what
Davidson and other nonreductive physicalists are committed to denying—​that
the explanatory system within which the performance exists as a particular com-
plex event (in terms of which we can make sense of what’s part of it and what
isn’t) can ultimately be reduced to (or otherwise explicated in terms of) physics.
If it can’t be—​if, in general, the discourses with respect to which we understand
performances, or our mental lives, can’t be systematically connected to physics—​
then the objects that are constituted in its terms will not be any sorts of physical
objects, since, with respect to physics, they will have the status not of complex
objects but of incoherent jumbles or heaps—​certainly not the sorts of things to
enter as particulars into nomological causal relationships.
246 Body and Mind

The Useful Vacuity of Global Supervenience

Global supervenience, which is frequently criticized as both excessively per-

missive and explanatorily opaque, has a role for theorists like Dupré and
Hornsby in making the point that the denial of the existence of immaterial stuff
does not commit one to physicalism. As such it is proffered not as a positive
thesis but as a way of granting the falsehood of dualism and of articulating the
minimal truth of physicalism (so minimal as not to count as physicalism on the
terms of most physicalists). Thus Dupré says: “if one removed from the uni-
verse all the physical entities . . . there would be nothing left” (Dupré 1993, 91).
Global supervenience has been formalized by John Haugeland, though that is
not his term for it. (He calls it “weak supervenience,” which for most authors
in this terminologically confusing literature refers to something quite else,
involving a different parameter of variation among theses from the one that
concerns me here.) Haugeland’s formulation (replacing his use of “weakly”
with “globally”) is “K globally supervenes on L (relative to W) just in case any
two worlds in W discernible with K are discernible with L.” (K and L are lan-
guages, W is a set of possible worlds. For present purposes let L be the lan-
guage of microphysics and K be the language of commonsense psychology)
(Haugeland 1982, 97).
Global supervenience captures the idea that if anything happens at all, some-
thing has to happen on the level of microphysics. If everywhere and for all of
time all the microparticles (or whatever microphysics turns out to be about)
were exactly as they in fact are, then nothing else could be any different. What
is important to note is just how weak this thesis is. It does not imply token iden-
tities. (Haugeland in fact proposes it explicitly as an alternative to token identi-
ties, which, he argues, fail for cases far less complex than the mental.) Nor does
it imply that supervening (mental) events are “determined by” or “dependent
upon” physical events—​an implication that is crucial for what most theorists
want out of a supervenience principle and partly definitive of what is meant by
“physicalism.”
The point of calling global supervenience “global” is to stress (what “serious”
supervenience theorists find problematic) that there need be no spatial or tem-
poral contiguity between a difference on the supervening level and a difference
in the supervenience base. A difference in my mental state need not be correlated
with a difference in my body or in anything near or causally connected to my
body, nor must there be a physically describable difference simultaneous with
or prior to the mental difference.8 All that matters is that there be some differ-
ence, even if far away and long ago or even yet to come. Such laxity is frequently
expressed as a (supposed) reductio: Post calls it ARFL, the “argument from licen-
tiousness” (Post 1995, 76). But whether such laxness counts for or against global
 Against Physicalism 247

supervenience ought to depend on what sorts of connections one thinks there

actually are. It is a feature, for example, of many of our ordinary psychological
terms that whether they truly apply can be a genuinely open question with re-
spect to everything, known or unknown, in the present or the past, but become
retroactively settled by something in the future.
It is, of course, precisely features of commonsense psychology such as this
that many psychologists and philosophers of psychology will want to “clean
up,” in part by imposing constraints on what can belong in the supervenience
base. But such constraints have nothing to do with avoiding substance dualism
and ought to reflect, rather than dictate, ordinary judgments of explanatory
adequacy. One may, for example, believe that the best (most explanatory, most
nearly true) accounts of love include this feature: that ascriptions of it remain,
up to a certain point (as Aristotle argued for happiness) hostage to the future.
Up to that point it can be indeterminate, to be settled by how things go on,
whether or not one’s feelings are really love. And if one thinks that, then one
will, for reasons having to do with explanatory adequacy, reject a restriction of
the supervenience base to the present and past. A common move at this point
is to posit some state that, it is claimed, does supervene on the person’s current
physical state—​as, for example, the notion of narrow content was developed to
try to deal with arguments about the nonindividualist nature of propositional
attitudes. But if, as I will argue below, our beliefs, attitudes, desires, and so on
are explanatory—​have the causes and effects that they do—​in virtue of their
being socially meaningful, then such posits will lose their point, which is pre-
cisely their supposed explanatory role.
Thus, the “licentiousness” that physicalists deplore in global supervenience—​
the fact that it licenses neither token identities nor theses of determination or
dependency—​is part of its appeal, not because anything goes, but because the
question of what goes and what doesn’t cannot, and should not, be settled a priori.
Kim charges adherents to global supervenience with accepting it as “a mere ar-
ticle of faith seriously lacking in motivation both evidentially and explanatorily”
(Kim 1993, 159); but as I am appealing to it, it no more requires either evidence
or explanatory usefulness than does my nonbelief in imperceptible and causally
inert fairies. The work that appears to be done by physicalist theses—​including
reductionism, eliminativism, functionalism, and token identity theses—​is actu-
ally done by complex and diverse explanations, including explanations that may
be locally reductive. We may in particular areas have well-​founded expectations
for one or another sort of explanation, but those expectations do not rest on,
nor are the successes explained by or evidence for, any metaphysical theses such
as physicalism in any of its forms. The unmotivated act of faith is, thus, on the
part of the physicalists, who not only have boundless and groundless faith in the
explanatory powers of some unimaginably remote Future Physics, but who are
248 Body and Mind

willing to sacrifice common sense (as well as real science) on its altar, placing on-
tological requirements on the objects of explanation in advance of working out
what those explanations are.

Taking Explanation Seriously

If we actually look at psychological explanations—​in particular, if we attend

to the aspects of those explanations that lead functionalists and Davidsonian
anomalous monists, among others, to reject the reductionism of type-​
identity theories—​we find that the phenomena that give such explanations
their explanatory force cannot be identified with, or be determined by, par-
ticular physical phenomena, for two general, related sorts of reasons. First,
the anomalousness of psychological explanations entails that the phenomena
that figure in them cannot be presumed to satisfy the constraints on being a
physical particular, and will, in fact, typically fairly obviously fail to satisfy
such constraints, however loosely conceived. And second, in many cases in
which psychological explanations can be seen to rest in some sense on phys-
ical goings-​on, such “supervenience” is on happenings that are sufficiently
scattered and remote in space and time as to defeat any general, substantive
claim of determining supervenience. The irreducibility of psychological ex-
planation is inherited by psychological ontology: we have no grip on what
the phenomena of psychology are other than whatever they have to be for
psychological explanations to be true.9 In general, our ordinary explanations
of human action, thought, and feeling appeal to social practices and norms;
and there is no reason to require, and much reason to deny, that our best
explanations will be compatible with an ontology whose objects’ individua-
tion is independent of the social and the normative.
I want to urge an understanding of socially constructed phenomena that has
close connections with understandings, such as those of John Dupré (1993),
Ian Hacking (1986, 1992), and Michael Root (1993, 149–​172; 2000), of socially
constructed kinds.10 Such kinds can figure in explanation, even causal explana-
tion. Consider:

(1)
Q: Why didn’t Alex get a heart attack when she was younger?
A: Because she’s a woman.
(2)
Q: Why didn’t Alex become CEO of the corporation?
A: Because she’s a woman.
(3)
Q: Why does Alex use the toilet marked with a stick figure with a triangle
in its middle?
A: Because she’s a woman.
 Against Physicalism 249

In the first exchange, referring to Alex’s being a woman points in the direction
of some physiological property that accounts for her having been less at risk of
a heart attack. “Woman” need not be a biologically real kind; gender can be (as
many feminist theorists have argued) socially constructed, perhaps to be dis-
tinguished from sex, which some have argued is biologically real. The explana-
tion works by gesturing toward something both causally related to the risk of
heart attacks and typically true of those in the social category “woman,” though
by no means true of all women (like, for example, the currently suspected pro-
perty in question, namely, the presence of relatively high levels of estrogen).
The answer in the second exchange is explanatory, by contrast, because of the
social significance of the category “woman”; thus, it might function as a cau-
tionary admonition to a biological male contemplating sex change. Not only
does this explanation give us no reason to attribute biological reality to the cate-
gory “woman,” but any biological category that might be proposed would inev-
itably lead to a “cleaning up” around the edges that would hurt rather than help
explanations such as this one (whereas explanations like the first, while useful as
they stand, would be helped by replacing the social category with the relevant bi-
ological one, if any). The third exchange is explanatory in a rather different sense.
It notes a connection between gender and segregated public toilets, and what
exactly is being explained is a matter of what the questioner can be presumed
not to know or to understand: it might, for example, explicate the meaning of the
international sign for “women’s toilet,” or it might be a reply, albeit a somewhat
impatient one, to someone who finds Alex’s womanhood questionable, perhaps
because, unlike the stick figure, Alex does not wear skirts.
Mental phenomena can be real in the same sort of way. Through our social
practices we interpret as meaningful bits of experience that may well be related in
significant, nonsocial ways (as people who share a race or a gender will typically
be similar or otherwise related in many nonsocial ways). But those relationships
are not such as to constitute particular entities of any sort. That constitution is
done by our finding and acting on patterns of salience, interpreting ourselves
and each other, and having and acting on expectations formed in the light of
those interpretations. As feminists have argued, for example, not just anyone can
be angry at any time, since part of what constitutes the pattern that counts as
anger has to do with who you are and whom you might be thought to be angry
at, about what, and so on (Frye 1983; Scheman 1993). It was easier not to notice
this fact when theorizing was in the hands of those who were less likely to run
up against the limits of intelligibility and who, when they did, had little reason
to see their failure to make sense as anything other than an idiosyncratic glitch.
(Similarly, noticing the social constructedness of gender was greatly helped by
the experiences of those, such as transsexuals, whose identities were, according
to the biologically naturalized view of gender, literally impossible.)
250 Body and Mind

Consider the following explanations:

(1a) Q: Why did her blood pressure shoot up?

A: It must have been because she got angry.
(2a) Q: Why did he fire her?
A: It must have been because she got angry.
(3a) Q: Why do they think she hates men?
A: It must be because she got angry.

The first and second examples offer causal explanations and would seem to
call for an account of her getting angry that indicates how it can cause some-
thing in her body, or some piece of his behavior. By analogy with the first set of
examples, however, neither 1a nor 2a supports the idea that her getting angry is
(or supervenes on or is determined by) some particular physical event(s). In 1a
we can adequately account for the explanatoriness of A while taking anger to be a
socially salient pattern of behavior, thoughts, and bodily feelings—​once we note
that the feelings typical of getting angry are correlated with sorts of bodily ten-
sion that can cause a rise in blood pressure. Particular emotions are more or less
closely associated with bodily feeling (anger more closely than happiness, less
closely than rage), and the nature of such associations is one of the ways in which
cultures differ in their emotional repertoires, explanations, and styles.11 What is
important to note—​just as with explaining the ceiling crack by blaming the per-
formance or explaining Alex’s lesser vulnerability to heart attack by her being
a woman—​is that as we move toward the more physically explanatory, getting
angry per se drops out; what matters is the tension, not what the tension means.
In 2a, by contrast, her getting angry (that it’s angry that she got) does not drop
out of the explanation—​any more than the performance drops out of the expla-
nation of the riot or Alex’s being a woman drops out of the explanation of her
not being promoted. He fired her because of what he took anger to mean and
because of his views about its (in)appropriateness for a woman. In Davidsonian
terms, we can put the point by saying that the anomalousness of psychological
explanation is inherited by psychological ontology. The normative, interpretive
element in psychological explanation enters into the construction of psycholog-
ical phenomena. No more physicalistically respectable phenomenon could play
the causal role getting angry plays in this explanation (as getting tense plays such
a role in 1a), since abstracting from the social constructedness means abstracting
from the context-​specific, normatively laden nature of (her) anger, and hence
from precisely what makes an appeal to it explanatory.
The third example would not usually be regarded as offering a causal explana-
tion: rather, getting angry (at something like that) is taken by A to be part of what
it is to be a feminist. Furthermore, we can argue over whether to count whatever
 Against Physicalism 251

she said and did as anger, as well as whether to count her anger as marking her
as a feminist. The patterns we note as salient and what we take them to signify
are matters for real dispute, as real and as resolvable as are disputes over causal
explanations; and we need an account of emotions and other psychological phe-
nomena that makes such disputes intelligible.
One might ask at this point whether we, the serious participants in the discur-
sive practices of commonsense psychology, are ontologically committed to such
things as beliefs, desires, attitudes, intentions, and emotions. Yes and no. No—​if
by “ontological commitment” you mean, as Quine meant, that the phenomena
in question need to be in the domain over which range the bound variables of a
well-​regimented theory that we regard as (approximately) true. There is no par-
ticular reason to believe (and some good reason to doubt) that the explanatory
practices of commonsense psychology will (or should) ever be so regimented.
Nor is there reason to think that anything is to be gained by insisting on the role
of specifically nominalized explanations: on “her anger” rather than “she was
angry,” on “his belief ” rather than “he believes,” on “her arrogance” rather than
“she’s talking arrogantly.” But yes—​if what’s at stake (and I do think this is what
matters more) is the possibility of objective, true accounts of ourselves and each
other, accounts that we can intelligibly challenge and revise, justify and rebut,
accounts that actually explain. That sort of commitment requires not theoretical
regimentation but seriousness about our roles and stakes in the practices that
construct the phenomena to which we are committed.
Thus, far from urging with respect to commonsense psychology some-
thing analogous to Moore’s “Defence of Common Sense” with respect to phys-
ical objects, I am arguing that attention to our practices is needed precisely
because what we are presumed to have in common, what “we” do or say is,
from a feminist perspective, far from unproblematic. “The common woman,”
the poet Judy Grahn told us in the 1970s, “is as common as the best of bread
/​and will rise . . . I swear it to you on my common /​woman’s /​head” (Grahn
1973, stanza VII). Feminist writers, artists, and theorists have often valorized
common women’s lives, including the knowledge that emerges from hands-​on
engagement with the messiness of daily life, in contrast to the idealizations of
science. When we want to urge experts to take us and our concerns seriously,
common sense is what is “ours,” not “theirs.” But appeal to what “we” are sup-
posed have in common, to what “everyone” knows or values, can prove notori-
ously uncongenial to feminists and our allies. Many of us stand condemned by
common sense: our lives are variously immoral, foolish, obscene, misguided, or
impossible. Expert discourses of various sorts can offer real or imagined refuge
from those condemnations: we may feel on firmer ground casting our lot with
“them” than with an “us” that places us on the margins or beyond the pale. We
may, for example, be confident that science will reveal the unnaturalness of
252 Body and Mind

heterosexist construals of sexuality or the ungroundedness of presumptions of

male superiority.
When, however, María Lugones writes about the tyranny of common sense,
as the expression of what the comfortable can presume to be obvious, in con-
trast to the improvisations of those she calls “streetwalkers,” she is articulating
a perspective from which science and common sense are, as they are for many
philosophers, continuous, one the disciplined extension of the other, both
grounded in what we all are presumed to have and to know in common and
which, she argues, actually excludes many from the realm of sense-​making
(Lugones 2003). Such are the ambiguous resonances of the word that one could
even say that being “common” (not, as some would say, “our kind of person”)
is one way of being excluded from the commons, the space of commonality.
The exclusion Lugones describes—​from the easy truths of common sense, what
all “right-​thinking” people know—​is the epistemic analogue of the ejection of
homeless people from the public library.
Once we acknowledge the ways in which, in Lugones’s terms, we “make each
other up,” set the terms in which we will be intelligible, mark out the patterns
of salience that construct the phenomena of mentality, we can ask about who
“we” are, how and why we do what we do, who reaps the benefits and bears the
burdens of the practices that give our lives the shapes they have, and who has
what sort of power when it comes to issues such as these. These are questions that
redirect our attention away from what is presumed to lie under and to under-
write the truths of common sense, and toward the practices through which such
truths are constructed.

Notes

1. Lugones (1991, 44).

2. This chapter was previously published in The Cambridge Companion to
Feminism in Philosophy, ed. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, 49–​ 67
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is reprinted here with
abridgements and slight modifications with the permission of the author and
press. I would like to thank David Golumbia and Lisa Banks for first encour-
aging me to reenter the philosophy of mind fray; Ernie Lepore for his criticisms
of an earlier (1983) paper and for (only partially heeded) advice on updating it;
and Louise Antony, Richard Boyd, and especially Georges Rey for pushing me to
explain why I professed to believe things that sounded completely crazy. I have
presented versions of the present chapter at the University of Toronto, University
of London (where John Dupré was my commentator) and Gothenburg and Umeå
Universities, and was greatly helped by the discussions, as I was by Michael Root’s
and Georges Rey’s careful critical readings of an earlier draft (though Rey, in
 Against Physicalism 253

particular, may wish to dispute any influence on the current version) and by long
conversations with Hornsby, Dupré, and Miranda Fricker.
3. On feminist accounts of the specifically social nature of the self, see, for example,
among philosophers in the analytic tradition, Baier (1985b), Friedman (1991), and
Lugones (this volume, 1991).
4. On the recasting of the central schisms between feminists as fruitful tensions, see
Snitow (1989, 205–​224).
5. On the laying down of requirements, see Diamond (1991). On the slide into the prob-
lematically philosophical, see Goldfarb (1983).
6. Here I don’t take exception to Kim’s use of “things” per se. I myself use “phenomena”
in a way that won’t stand up to heavy ontological scrutiny. For the use of “phenomena”
as an ontologically neutral umbrella term, see Rey (1997, 13 n. 4). My own use is even
more neutral than his, since he claims neutrality only with respect to the sort of phe-
nomenon in question (event, state, process, etc.), whereas I intend to be neutral on
the prior question of ontological commitment.
7. For Davidson’s argument that this is the case, see Davidson (1980, 180). For a similar
argument to mine against the idea that token identities can survive the demise of any
theory connecting types, see Putnam (1979). Putnam recognized, as Davidson has
not, that views about the holistic, normative nature of psychological explanation are
incompatible with taking such explanations to be about things whose existence as
particulars is independent of the practices that ground the explanations.
8. Thus, the insights of Tyler Burge, Hilary Putnam, and others about the social nature
of the content of propositional attitudes go much deeper than is usually presumed
and cannot, for example, be met by appeals to narrow content.
9. The parallel to Quine’s famous dictum “To be is to be the value of a variable” is, of
course, intentional. I would argue, however, that psychological explanation cannot be
sufficiently regimented to meet Quinean standards for ontological commitment, and
that, in fact, there is no good reason to commit ourselves to any particular ontology for
the mental at all, which is not to say that we don’t have good grounds for committing
ourselves to the possibility of objectively true psychological explanations.
10. Root (2000) develops an account of what he calls “real social kinds,” whose realness
consists in the ways in which systematic social practices make all those things (typi-
cally, people) that fall within the kind interchangeable. He argues that social kinds are
relative to times and places, reflecting the variability of the relevant social practices: if,
for example, race or gender is real here and now, it is because we make it so.
11. Bodily goings-​on are taken to be differently significant, to form a more or less central
part of patterns that are emotions, in different cultures. See, for example, Rosaldo
(1989).

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Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind by Cora Diamond, 13–​38. Cambridge,
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edited by Claudia Card, 161–​179. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
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Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Claudia Card, 35–​44. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
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de la Callejera.” In Pilgrimages/​Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple
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Sciences of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 14
Why Feminists Should Be Materialists
and Vice Versa
Paula Droege

For most of my scholarly life, philosophy of mind and feminism have been
separate and distinct pursuits.1 It is time for this to change. As a feminist, I am
committed to the investigation of factors contributing to inequality. Since be-
lief systems are one of the most pernicious sources of inequality due to the way
they justify and perpetuate the status quo, we need to understand the material
basis of beliefs and values in order to appreciate the constraints and possibilities
for change. A clearer sense of the way real, biologically evolved minds negotiate
their physical and social environments can deepen our sense of connection to
the world and to one another.2
As a materialist, I am committed to an explanation of mental phenomena in
physical terms. At one time in analytic philosophy that commitment entailed
logical arguments about the reduction of folk psychology to physics. In the first
section, I distinguish between this restrictive physicalism and a broader materi-
alist account of the dynamic relations among mind, body, and environment. This
empirically based, interdisciplinary approach to explanation demands engage-
ment with the world in a way that is distinctively feminist. Feminist practices
include a focus on process, dialogue, collaboration, and other epistemic skills to
consider the perspective of others. We need these practices to understand and
appreciate the value of alternative methodologies. Materialists also need femi-
nism to interrogate the social and political forces that structure our work. The
sorts of questions we ask, the way questions are formulated, and the way evi-
dence is gathered in support of answers are all shaped by assumptions about
what and who is valuable. In the second section, I show how interdisciplinary
research on fish consciousness demonstrates the epistemic and ethical value of
feminist methods. I consider the liberatory praxis of these methods to be fun-
damentally feminist, even when the researchers utilizing them do not identify
their approach with the label “feminist.” The effective results of these practices in
the interdisciplinary investigation of fish minds is a strong argument for the in-
clusion of feminist critique and methodology in philosophy of mind. Feminism

Paula Droege, Why Feminists Should Be Materialists and Vice Versa In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind.
Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0015
256 Body and Mind

provides materialists with alternative ways of thinking and methods for investi-
gating the nature of mind.

Why Feminists Should Be Materialists

At the outset, a word about terminology is in order. “Materialism” in feminist

theory is usually cashed in terms of some version of Marxism. Like Darwin, Marx
was prescient in recognizing that minds are shaped by physical interactions. Yet
traditional Marxist analysis focuses too narrowly on material relations of pro-
duction to offer a general theory of mind. As I use the term, “materialism” refers
to accounts of mental processes in terms of natural, physical relations. Materialist
theories explain how the mind could be produced by brains and bodies oper-
ating in the world. Next, I discuss a reductive version of materialism, standardly
called “physicalism.” On this more restrictive account, the items and laws of fun-
damental physics specify all mental states and their causal powers. I will argue
for a nonreductive account of materialism and show how it escapes earlier femi-
nist criticisms of physicalism.

Not Your Father’s Physicalism

In “Against Physicalism,” Naomi Scheman presents an argument that targets

both physicalism and the broader form of materialism that I advocate. Since
the terms are often used interchangeably, one reason for using “physicalism”
to refer just to reductive materialism is to separate what is right in Scheman’s
objections from what is wrong about a wholesale rejection of physical causal ex-
planation in philosophy of mind. According to Scheman, physicalism is empty:
ontologically, mind and body “ought not to have been analytically distinguished
in the first place,” and epistemically, psychological explanation is social and so
cannot be reduced to the terms of physics (Scheman, this volume, 243). These
two dimensions of the argument are interrelated, so it can be tricky to tease
them apart.
Beginning with the epistemological claim, Scheman is certainly correct to
object to the physicalist claim that beliefs, desires, and values can be entirely
explained in terms of the causal relations of physics. My belief that raising the
minimum wage would help alleviate poverty is structured by concepts that have
no analogues in physical theory. Just think about what in the world could serve
as the physical instantiation of “minimum wage.” Like the “average family,” the
term does not refer to anything describable using the language of atoms, vectors,
and such. The physical structures that constitute my belief are, as Scheman puts
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 257

it, “incoherent jumbles or heaps—​certainly not the sorts of things to enter as

particulars into nomological causal relationships” (Scheman, this volume, 245).
An explanation of my belief requires an examination of my upbringing and
experiences as well as consideration of my other beliefs. In the minimum wage
example, concepts are essentially social, but the point applies to more mundane
beliefs such as the belief that apples are delicious. What items I consider to be
“apples” and “delicious” depends on how my mind has come to organize the
world as a result of positive and negative interactions with fruit and other tasty
things. My English linguistic community also shaped the way I sort things into
categories. A good explanation should also be able to predict the sort of actions
that would follow from my belief that apples are delicious, such as the inclination
to eat one when hungry. Yet even a perfect understanding of the quantum pro-
cesses that subserve mental states would be unable to determine the content of
my belief, much less predict action, unless the belief is first individuated as the
belief it is.
Neuroscientists often fail to recognize this crucial point when they make
claims about the ability of brain imaging machines to “read minds” (Smith 2013).
Images of the brain can only be interpreted as representing an object or a face as
a consequence of previously correlating that specific brain activity with objects
and faces. To interpret a brain image as representing an emotion, such as fear,
requires subjective report to identify the relevant brain processes (Popper 2013).
Any ability of a machine to read minds depends on first making the text legible,
and that depends on an understanding of the relations among brain, mind, and
world. In other words, a belief is a meaningful object only at the psychological
level of explanation.
The importance of the psychological (and social) in understanding the phys-
ical does not mean, however, that “our mental lives . . . can’t be systematically
connected to physics” (Scheman, this volume, 245). Physics is systematically
connected to chemistry, which is systematically connected to biology, which is
systematically connected to neuropsychology. There is value in articulating these
connections, in seeing the forces operative at different levels of explanation.
While Scheman is right to object to physicalist arguments that the ontological
dependence of the mind on the body rules out psychological explanation, she
commits an equivalent mistake when she rules out the potential contribution of
physical causal explanation.3 Nonreductive materialists offer an account of levels
of explanation that preserves a role for social relations in individuating belief
content yet remaining committed to the material constitution of mental states
and processes (Baker 2009).
The larger worry that seems to motivate Scheman’s opposition to physicalism
is that grounding the reality of the mental in the physical puts socially consti-
tuted structures at risk of elimination or devaluation. We will be inclined to look
258 Body and Mind

for structures that fit neatly into a physical causal system and fail to recognize the
forces operating at a higher level of explanation. In her example of the explana-
tion of a rise in blood pressure as a result of getting angry, Scheman argues that
the socially salient fact of anger drops out when the physical connection between
bodily stress and blood pressure become the focus. According to Scheman, we
need to reject physicalism in order to preserve the value of social and psycholog-
ical explanation:

In general, our ordinary explanations of human action, thought, and feeling ap-
peal to social practices and norms; and there is no reason to require, and much
reason to deny, that our best explanations will be compatible with an ontology
whose objects’ individuation is independent of the social and the normative.
(Scheman, this volume, 248)

I think Scheman is right to worry about the tendency to privilege physical expla-
nation over other forms of explanation. This worry applies both to the reductive
physicalism she targets and to the broader form of materialism I recommend.
The gendered hierarchy of knowledge subordinates domains such as social
theory to domains coded as masculine, such as physical theory (Anderson 1995).
Testosterone makes men aggressive, rather than a normative masculinity that
encourages violence and abuse. Poor diet explains poverty, rather than the re-
verse. Physical explanations such as these are tempting, because they offer the
possibility of simple solutions. A tweak of the genes or the biochemistry is far
less costly and disruptive to those in power than restructuring the social system
to teach men better self-​control or eliminate wealth inequality. Feminists have
reason to be careful that social and political explanations are not eclipsed when a
physical account appears.
Nonetheless, we can maintain our epistemic vigilance without sacrificing
metaphysical explanation in the way Scheman argues:

One of my central arguments is that taking commonsense psychology seriously

is to be committed not to a theoretically vexing ontology of objects (mental
events, states, and processes), but rather to practices, explanation among them,
and to the nuances of our lives as shaped and made intelligible through those
practices. (Scheman, this volume, 244–​245)

The suggestion here is that attention to ontology distracts from understanding

social relations. This move is problematic because practices, including explana-
tion, cannot be fully understood without an ontology of the physical world. To
think otherwise is to accept the same picture Scheman finds faulty: that physical
causation is essentially independent from social forces.
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 259

Take, for example, the theoretically vexing ontology of sex differences.

Longtime feminist dogma drew a sharp distinction between sex and gender. Sex
is biological and irrelevant except in the way that social forces gender bodies
as feminine and masculine. There were certainly some important theoret-
ical benefits to this move. By ignoring the physical and focusing on the social,
feminists usefully revealed the disciplinary practices that train bodies to per-
form gender (Butler 2006). At the same time, however, the split between sex and
gender obscured the complex interactions between biological and social forces
that are now being explored by feminist scientists. As one example, Anne Fausto-​
Sterling offers a detailed account of the ways biological differences like intersex
resist social construction into a neat gender binary (Fausto-​Sterling 2012). Social
theory is indispensable in its ability to identify power hierarchies and their in-
fluence on our observation of and theories about sex differences. Nonetheless,
explanation is limited without an ontology of the physical forces at play in our
interactions with the world and one another.

Toward a Feminist Materialism

A distinctively feminist materialism suggests we reconceive the physical world as

imbricated in while remaining autonomous from the social world. Rather than
focus feminism exclusively on social practices, we should construct a materi-
alism that demonstrates the dynamic interaction among social, environmental,
mental, and biological processes. Adherents of this view, called “new materi-
alism,” advocate a picture of physical causation as indeterminate, constantly in
flux, and potentially both disruptive and supportive of human projects.
This new picture of the physical world departs from the clockwork machine
envisioned by Isaac Newton. While a classical calculus regulates interactions be-
tween middle-​sized objects like billiard balls, items at both the quantum scale
and the astrophysical scale fail to fit the neat patterns of Newton’s laws. So long
as they are described within an appropriate frame, causal processes are perfectly
predictable. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion; force is equal to mass
times acceleration. Complications arise when factors outside the frame are in-
volved. Subatomic particles spin out of grasp; planets cycle in nonlinear rotation.
Biology likewise resists the regimentation of law-​based causation. Formulas
for deriving effect from cause are less useful than explanations that identify
patterns and mechanisms. Things become exponentially more complicated as
psychology, meteorology, and sociology introduce causal factors such as emo-
tion, climate, and familial bonds into the explanatory mix. In this picture of
a multifaceted, dynamically changing world, materialism is not adequately
described in terms of simple, unexceptioned causal laws. Consequently, the idea
260 Body and Mind

that a pill or snip of the genetic code will solve anyone’s problems misrepresents
the complexity of physical systems.
Samantha Frost describes the liberating potential of materialism in terms of
the openness to resources beyond the subjective and historical. Humans are nei-
ther Cartesian minds operating in a disembodied realm of reason, nor simply
products of Marxist praxis whereby our actions in the world condition our na-
ture. By recognizing that the material world has “its own impetus and trajec-
tory,” we can “explore how the forces of matter and the processes of organic life
contribute to the play of power or provide elements or modes of resistance to it”
(Frost 2011, 70). Feminists who eschew the material world deprive themselves of
its explanatory power as well as its inherent tendency to change and adapt.
As the unrelenting forces of climate change demonstrate, natural processes
operate outside the constraints of political and economic hegemony. Climate
deniers can prevent appropriate response, but they cannot stop the earthquakes,
arctic melt, or drought by sheer political will. The material world exhibits a kind
of agency, a capacity to act independently of human intention in unexpected
and transformative ways. Of course, climate change itself was caused by human
projects, so the independence exhibited by natural processes is additive to rather
than exclusive of human agency. The forces of nature act in response to human
action, and humans act in response to the forces of nature. As Frost puts it:

New materialists push feminists to relinquish the unidirectional model of cau-

sation in which either culture or biology is determinative and instead to adopt a
model in which causation is conceived as complex, recursive, and multi-​linear.
(Frost 2011, 71)

Adopting this interactive model of causation requires a reconception of tra-

ditional ideas about free will and determinism (Droege 2010; Roskies 2006).
Agency is not a matter of a conscious mind deciding to act in the absence of
physical causation. Instead, what is critical to robust agency is a capacity for
control of action in a way that is appropriate for the proper functioning of the
system. An advantage of this description is that it is expansive enough to cover
ecosystems, yet it can be tailored to the specific needs and abilities of humans.
Ecosystems control action by responding adaptively to achieve homeostasis. For
humans, biological responsiveness is conditioned by cognitive processes and so-
cial influences.
So, though I endorse the new materialist ascription of agency to natural pro-
cesses, I do not agree with those who believe agency requires a mind. In my
view, a mind is a physical system that serves the function of representing the
world, including various states of itself. Ecosystems do not survive by virtue of
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 261

representational states, so they have no mind. Nonetheless, ecosystems act in

ways to preserve themselves, to adapt to changing conditions.
One of the appealing features of new materialism is the way agency is prior
to and an ontological ground for mental attributes such as a sense of self. In
“Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” Elizabeth Grosz argues that reconfig-
uring concepts of agency can make them “ontological conditions rather than
moral ideals” (Grosz 2010, 139). Feminist arguments for rights and recognition,
while necessary to open up a space of action free from oppressive structures, fail
to articulate a positive account of how to use that freedom. The assumption is
that removal of restraints will allow a person to pursue her “real” interests and
values, as if a true person exists separate from social shaping. Such an idea runs
counter to both feminist and materialist conceptions of a self formed through its
interactions with the social and physical environment.
Given this relational view of the self, the release from restraint is only
liberatory if action in the future differs from the past. As Grosz argues, a future-​
oriented conception of freedom is needed to describe how a person can change
herself through her actions:

The question of freedom for women, or for any oppressed social group, is never
simply a question of expanding the range of available options so much as it is
about transforming the quality and activity of the subjects who choose and who
make themselves through how and what they do. (Grosz 2010, 151)

A subject acts in the world in ways that conform to or violate her sense of herself.
Actions that violate a subject’s sense of herself prompt change, whereas actions
that express her self are free. In contrast to the standard formulation, acts are not
entirely free or entirely determined, freedom is the degree to which an action
expresses the self. Further, the self is not a static metaphysical substance, on this
view, but a dynamically evolving constellation of physical and mental states. So
an action that is consonant with my self today may be discordant with my self in
the future and vice versa.
Memory is a central component in the human capacity to transform ourselves.
Actions with negative consequences are remembered, and the self is refigured to
avoid repeating the error. Even actions we do not cause must be somehow incor-
porated into the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. In this ongoing process
of action and interpretation, a self is formed and reformed over time.

Freedom is thus not primarily a capacity of mind but of body: it is linked to

the body’s capacity for movement, and thus its multiple possibilities of ac-
tion. Freedom is not an accomplishment granted by the grace or good will of
262 Body and Mind

the other but is attained only through the struggle with matter, the struggle of
bodies to become more than they are, a struggle that occurs not only on the
level of the individual but of the species. (Grosz 2010, 152)

This reconfigured materialism is not only compatible with freedom, but is, as
Grosz proposed, the ontological condition for freedom. Feminists should be
materialists, because our engagement with the material world shapes who we are
and holds the promise of what we can become. Consider, for instance, the ways
implicit bias functions to reproduce racism. Research in cognitive psychology
demonstrates that most people unconsciously associate white faces with posi-
tive attributes and black faces with negative attributes (Banaji and Greenwald
2013). These biases are formed by interacting with a racist culture, and they
shape how we act in the world—​whom we trust or fear, whom we love or hate.
By understanding how implicit biases are formed and reinforced, it is possible to
act in ways that can reshape bias. We can restructure physical environments to
encourage diversity; develop media to undermine stereotypes, and personally
work to develop friendships that cross familiar boundaries of race. While these
recommendations are not new and are consistent with the sort of social con-
struction theory advocated by Scheman, the empirical grounding in cognitive
psychology gives them additional force (Devine et al. 2012). Tools for assessing
the extent of bias and efforts in remediation are based in materialist theories of
habit formation and perception. Far from distracting feminists from the social
practices that structure action, materialism places those practices within a causal
network open to multiple points of pressure. Issues of racism and sexism are no
longer only social/​political issues on which opinions and values differ; the mate-
rial basis of attitudes makes them real in a way that can motivate change. A fem-
inism that utilizes the full range of pressure points is best suited to shaping a
future empowering to women.

Why Materialists Should Be Feminists

If the foregoing argument is accepted, feminists should be materialists, but why

should materialists be feminists? Naturalized epistemologists long ago argued
against the positivist idea that social and political values can be separated from
metaphysical facts. Yet there persists a masculinist tendency in analytic phi-
losophy of mind to privilege logical analysis and neuroscientific data in isola-
tion from their connections to issues of ethics and justice. This myopia is both
unsustainable and oppressive. Contemporary research on the mind demands
interdisciplinary investigation, and its empirical and theoretical results have im-
mediate and far-​reaching consequences. Materialists no longer have the luxury
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 263

of fantasizing about possible worlds. The real world requires answers to real
questions about the nature of the mind.
Before her untimely death, I spent several years collaborating with a cognitive
ethologist, Victoria Braithwaite, to find an answer to the very pressing question
of animal consciousness. As a result of this collaboration I have learned a great
deal about animals, and also the practices and values of animal researchers. My
impression is that the field of animal cognition is significantly less patriarchal
than philosophy, yet research in animal cognition is not published as “feminist.”
This situation raises some provocative issues about what exactly feminism is and
what value it contributes to theorizing about the mind.
In this section I propose two ways that feminist theory is useful to the devel-
opment of a materialist theory of mind:

(1) Feminist epistemology offers insight into engaging across disciplines.

(2) Feminist theory questions assumptions about the nature of minds that are
based on a history of unequal power relations.

I will show how these features of feminist theory are advantageous in addressing
the question of animal consciousness, and also how the values of feminism arise
organically when one adopts a naturalist perspective on reality. Consequently,
feminist praxis proves to be the best method for interdisciplinary research
on the mind, even when it is not conducted under the label “feminism.”4 This
last point will bring us full circle back to the reasons why feminists should be
materialists.

Feminism and Interdisciplinary Research

Let me begin with a description of the current debate about animal conscious-
ness. The philosophical problem was laid out by Thomas Nagel in his famous
rhetorical question: “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel 1974). The answer is sup-
posed to be that we have no idea and cannot possibly have an idea about what it is
like to be a bat, because we don’t share the conceptual structure of a bat. Unless
you are a bat, you cannot understand the conscious experience of a bat.
While Nagel’s mysterianism about consciousness has given way to philosoph-
ical and neuropsychological theories of consciousness for humans, many still
think that we cannot possibly have an idea about the consciousness of animals
because they cannot tell us what their experience is like. The driving assump-
tion is that we can solve the problem of consciousness for humans to the ex-
tent that we are very much like one another. If your brain is similar to mine and
you say similar things about your experience as I say about mine, then we can
264 Body and Mind

conclude that we share similar sorts of conscious experience. I will come back
to the problems with this argument from analogy in the next section. For now
I just want to point out that the analogy breaks down with animals at the very
beginning—​with their failure to report about their experiences.
Curiously, at about the same time that Nagel published his musings about bat
consciousness, bat researcher Donald Griffin published The Question of Animal
Awareness where he argues that animals are indeed conscious (Griffin 1976).
Griffin’s book, along with work by others published about the same time, began
the field of cognitive ethology, which is the study of how minds evolve as a func-
tion of behavior. The field is deeply and essentially interdisciplinary as it requires
expertise in at least psychology, biology, physiology, and paleontology.
To this list we should add philosophy and feminism. The contribution
philosophers can make to this research is to help organize concepts and relations
in order to better identify the targets for explanation. This work is especially im-
portant in consciousness research because the concepts are all fairly muddled.
There is disagreement across the board on whether self-​consciousness is nec-
essary to consciousness, whether representations are involved and if so how,
whether unconscious mental states exist, and so on. Different philosophical the-
ories yield different answers to the question of whether animals are conscious, so
it is important to have some idea about what exactly the claim is when one claims
to show that animals are conscious.
Feminists can help researchers from these various different fields learn to talk
to one another. In particular, work done by multicultural feminists addresses
the challenges and possibilities of communicating across differing worldviews
(hooks 2015; Lugones, this volume; 2003). It takes time to learn the language
of another field and to find value in the knowledge and practices that another
person brings to a problem. Because interdisciplinary research runs counter
to the hierarchical, individualist structure of academic rewards, participants
need skills for developing collaborations and encouragement for tackling its
challenges.
Feminist practices such as a focus on process rather than product and di-
alogue rather than debate facilitate an open-​ended approach that can ex-
pand thinking beyond disciplinary borders. By asking the process question
of how we know rather than the product question of what we know, feminist
epistemologists draw attention to the situatedness of participants within their
fields and their ways of knowing (Harding 1991; Tuana 2013). Recognition of
different standards of evidence and forms of reasoning are essential to collabora-
tive research. Likewise, effective collaboration depends on eschewing the adver-
sary method that dominates philosophy. As Janice Moulton argues, philosophers
problematically assume that “the only, or at any rate, the best, way of evaluating
work in philosophy is to subject it to the strongest or most extreme opposition”
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 265

(Moulton 2013).5 This oppositional stance fails to acknowledge the importance

of shared beliefs and values in the pursuit of truth. We need to agree minimally
on the question to be investigated and the results that would count as a solution.
Moreover, the emphasis on a winning argument comes at the expense of other
epistemic goals such as fitting together beliefs into a coherent and useful pattern.
Even where the benefits of interdisciplinary research are obvious to
participants, the lack of structural support in terms of grants, publication, and
promotion can undermine commitment. A feminist critique of the power rela-
tions that reinforce existing research paradigms can galvanize group members to
resist the status quo. Recognition of the power of a creative, collaborative effort
inspires the development of new structures, such as the revaluation of publica-
tion in interdisciplinary journals, a push for more interdisciplinary grant awards,
the acceptance of promotion letters from outside a researcher’s home discipline,
and so forth (Fehr 2011; Stewart 2009; Bronstein 2003).
Happily, some of these changes are taking place; however, the changes are
rarely based on feminist arguments or undertaken by people who think of them-
selves as feminists. This raises the question of whether this work is, in fact, fem-
inist, and the prior question of what it is for materialism to be feminist. At its
core, feminism works to include the voices of women in accounts of their experi-
ence and location (Lugones and Spelman 1983; Butnor and McWeeny 2014). The
principal goal for feminism is to find a way to end the subordination of women
while recognizing differences between women and men, and among women.
Methods for achieving this goal require foremost a respect for the beliefs and
values that structure different views. In tackling the problem of animal con-
sciousness, cognitive ethologists have adopted similar methods. Whether to call
their efforts “feminist” may seem a matter of semantics, and as such a reason not
to apply a political label to practices that are not conducted under that label.
But there is a deeper, substantive issue about the sort of practices that are
both epistemically effective and socially just. To say that cognitive ethology is
already feminist is to say that practices designed to recognize value in another’s
knowledge and experience are liberating. By advocating that cognitive ethology
include feminism, I am proposing that the field can benefit from a better un-
derstanding of the values it already promotes for epistemic reasons. More to the
point of this book, I maintain that philosophy of mind would benefit from both
cognitive ethology and feminism.
As noted in the beginning of this section, philosophy of mind continues to be
dominated by masculinist values. Logical analysis is prized over explanation that
incorporates other forms of reasoning based on empirical evidence and herme-
neutic interpretation.6 Where data do appear, fields such as neuroscience and
psychophysics are more likely to be represented than behavioral or social re-
search. Though Nagel asked what it is like to be a bat, it was Kathleen Akins who
266 Body and Mind

took that question seriously and presented a beautiful interdisciplinary answer

(Akins 1993). By combining insights from vision science, biology, and behav-
ioral psychology, Akins described how much we can actually know about what it
is like to be a bat from the bat’s perspective.

Assumptions about the Nature of Mind

So, one reason materialists should be feminists is that the process of interdis-
ciplinary work will be more effective if everyone develops feminist epistemic
practices. The second reason materialists should be feminists is to rethink prob-
lematic assumptions that are the legacy of a male-​dominated history in philos-
ophy of mind. Assumptions about the nature of the mind have been developed
by privileged, educated, adult men reflecting on their own minds. Descartes’s du-
alism and his skeptical rationalism epitomize the theoretical mistakes that result
from this disengaged, disembodied perspective (Bordo 1999). But even contem-
porary, enactivist philosophers can suffer from self-​oriented modes of thought
produced by privilege. Alva Noë begins his recent book with the “everyday ex-
perience” of coming to appreciate unfamiliar art (Noë 2012). While this sort of
experience is fascinating and worthy of philosophical examination, it is hardly
everyday.
Regarding animals, the experience is entirely foreign. Art may not be entirely
foreign to animals (there are the elephants that paint portraits), but coming to
appreciate an unfamiliar style probably is. By starting theory from a perspective
that excludes the possibility of participation from other species, either the theory
will rule out the possibility that they are conscious or it will simply fail to address
the question.
Beginning with an examination of relatively simple animals such as fish, on
the other hand, addresses several important questions. For one, fish exemplify
the weakness of the argument from analogy. Nagel thought bats were alien, but
now most consciousness researchers agree that the neurophysiology and beha-
vior of mammals are clear evidence of consciousness (Low et al. 2012). Much
less is known about the neural structure of fish, and what we do know speaks to a
very different functional architecture (Braithwaite 2010).
Working with fish also demands attention to environmental pressures and
evolutionary history. The wide variety of fish species exhibits an equally wide
variety of cognitive capacities. A fish species that evolved in a relatively safe,
nutrient-​rich environment does not exhibit the same foraging skills or escape
behavior as a fish species that evolved in a more stressful environment. Cognitive
differences can also be found in members of the same species that live in different
ecological niches. For example, three-​spined stickleback fish raised in a pond
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 267

navigate using landmark cues, whereas when the same fish are raised in a river
they use water flow direction to navigate (Braithwaite and Girvan 2003).
Good experimental work in fish cognition requires adopting the perspective
of the animal in order to determine how it solves the challenges that arise in its
particular environment. Rather than drawing analogies from human experience
to fish experience, we need to enter the world of the fish. In philosophy, rather
than theorizing about the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness
across possible worlds, we need to decenter logical reasoning and focus instead
on function, evolutionary continuity, and interdependence.
In my work on animal consciousness, I find myself using all of the skills I have
learned in feminist epistemology. In thinking about other beings, it is impor-
tant to avoid both assimilation, the assumption that others are just like me, and
exoticization, the assumption that others are nothing like me (Narayan 1998).
I need to decenter my knowledge and values in order to be open to understanding
another’s way of being and acting in the world (Saul 2003). Finally, thinking
about who benefits from various assumptions about the criteria for conscious-
ness reveals the political interests that often motivate oppressive structures
(Harding 1991).
With fish, the tendency toward exoticization is particularly strong. Fish are
different: they don’t breathe air, they don’t walk, they don’t communicate through
facial expressions (outside of Disney movies). A recent argument maintains that
fish cannot possibly feel pain because pain requires a cortex and fish have no
cortex (Key 2016). There can hardly be a clearer example of exoticization. Human
pain defines the nature of pain, so an animal that fails to satisfy the human-​
defined standard does not feel pain. This move effectively puts fish outside the
circle of ethical concern. Not only are fish incapable of Kantian self-​legislation,
they are not even due utilitarian consideration. The other extreme of assimilation
is no better. Relevant differences among animals and their various behavioral
repertoires need to be delineated. No one-​size-​fits-​all test of consciousness will
be adequate to determine how different minds navigate different environments.
I have argued that a theory of consciousness grounded in evolutionary func-
tion can articulate a definition of consciousness that accounts for key features
of human phenomenology and opens the way to scientific investigation of an-
imal consciousness (Droege and Braithwaite 2014). When consciousness is de-
fined in terms of function, evidence that animal minds fulfill that function is
evidence that they are conscious. There is good evidence that many fish exhibit
the behavioral flexibility that I believe requires consciousness. This prospect
raises concerns about the welfare of fish in the aquaculture and fishing indus-
tries. While the consciousness of fish is not in itself an argument against raising
or hunting fish for food—​we raise and hunt mammals which are widely ac-
knowledged to be conscious—​it is an argument for practices that minimize their
268 Body and Mind

pain. Some groups have been responsive to this argument and have developed
methods to kill fish as swiftly and painlessly as possible (Athrappully 2013).
So, on the issue of animal welfare, we again find researchers at the forefront
who do not think of themselves as feminist, yet they embody the values and
practices advocated by feminist epistemology and feminist ethics. I am con-
vinced that a naturalist approach to knowledge gathering produces both the
most effective scientific results and the most socially just methodology as re-
search and industry collaborate to develop best practices for animal welfare.
In sum, materialists need feminists to gain a critical perspective on current
practices and assumptions. Particularly in the case of animal consciousness, tra-
ditional philosophical methods of detached reflection fail to address the funda-
mental question: What is it like to be a fish? The best animal researchers have
engaged that question and adopted the perspective of fish to better understand
their needs and capacities. A more explicit feminist approach can only aid these
researchers in articulating effective arguments in favor of a naturalized and hu-
mane animal research program.
There remains the significant problem of how exactly materialists could in-
corporate feminist methodology. A first step in philosophy of mind would be to
include feminist epistemology in research and pedagogy. In other words, materi-
alist philosophers should be feminist philosophers. We can also encourage better
feminist praxis by breaking down the institutional barriers to interdisciplinary
work. This step is important, because no one can master the knowledge and
practices of all the relevant disciplines needed to understand the mind. Perhaps
the most important intervention, then, is to increase the number of feminist
administrators to advocate for collaborative research.
At root, the argument that materialists should be feminists rests on the same
reasons that feminists should be materialists. Feminist materialism offers greater
explanatory power, more effective epistemic practices, better tools for interdisci-
plinary engagement, and multifaceted resources for scientific investigation and
political intervention. A dynamic, interactive materialism offers feminists a con-
ception of agency that avoids the strictures of reductionism and determinism
as well as the empty promise of rights in the absence of the material conditions
for action. Feminist epistemology and ethics offer materialists an understanding
of the value in recognizing divergent perspectives and methods for developing
theory that incorporates insights from multiple points of view. Feminist mate-
rialism balances the drive toward truth grounded in a complex and shifting re-
ality with a recognition that our tools of inquiry are shaped by a particular social
and political position. Consequently, our theories about the nature of the mind
and the remedy for injustice should be integrated into a single approach that
acknowledges the full range of connections among mind and body, social and
physical world.
 Why Feminists Should Be Materialists 269

Notes

1. This chapter benefited enormously from the generous comments by Keya Maitra and
Jennifer McWeeny. I am also grateful for the feedback on an earlier version of the
second section, presented at the FEMMSS6 conference.
2. Even evidence that suggests disconnection, such as research revealing implicit racial
bias, is more effectively confronted when better understood.
3. On the mind-​body problem and psychological explanation, see Kim (2005).
4. Thanks to Mariana Ortega (in conversation) for helping me to articulate the value of
feminist praxis whether or not it is recognized as such.
5. Moulton also points out that the adversary method must be deductive, which is obvi-
ously at odds with predominantly inductive reasoning in the sciences.
6. Analytic philosophy of mind is becoming more open to empirical evidence. Though
phenomenology takes hermeneutical interpretation to be essential to its methodology,
its tradition is more resistant to evidence from other disciplines such as neuroscience
and biology. To the extent that standards are changing in these traditions, I endorse
this movement.

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 15
Which Bodies Have Minds?
Feminism, Panpsychism, and the Attribution Question
Jennifer McWeeny

Mental attribution is a social and political issue as much as it is an epistemo-

logical and metaphysical one.1 Feminist philosophers, decolonial theorists,
philosophers of race, and other critical social theorists have examined how sys-
tems of domination perpetuate themselves by denying minds and mental cap-
acities to particular kinds of bodies, including those of women, Black people,
people of color, Jews, the working classes, people with disabilities, and non-
human animals. Philosophers of mind who do not also engage these literatures
have pursued the question of which bodies have minds abstractly by comparison,
analyzing the concepts of “mind” and “matter” that would allow the two to in-
teract, specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions that a body would need
to meet if it were to have a mind, and invoking thought experiments about the
conceivability of zombies and other imagined bodies to illustrate relationships
between the mental and the physical.
During the twentieth century, philosophers primarily approached mental at-
tribution from an epistemological angle through the problem of other minds.
Although the majority of this literature looks at how we come to attribute minds
and mental states to other individuals or other species, recent work has con-
sidered the problem of other minds in terms of social categories, noting ways
that minds and mental states are differentially recognized across people of dif-
ferent genders, races, classes, and abilities (Taylor 2015; Tullman 2019; Jones, this
volume).
The twenty-​first century has brought with it an ontological turn in the ques-
tion of mental attribution that stretches beyond the traditional epistemological
interpretation. Rather than focus on the possibility of knowing minds besides
our own, a number of research programs challenge conventional understandings
of the metaphysical relationship between mindedness and materiality by
reimagining ontologies of the human, animal, vegetable, and mineral domains,
as well as the purported boundaries among them. For example, artificial intel-
ligence researchers consider whether computers have consciousness; feminist
new materialists and posthumanists emphasize the agency of the environment;

Jennifer McWeeny, Which Bodies Have Minds? In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer
McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0016
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 273

Black studies scholars examine links between attributions of irrationality/​

hypermateriality and the dehumanization of Black people, colonized peoples,
and others; and panpsychists argue that particles such as electrons and quarks
are experiential in nature.
Such projects reframe the classic metaphysical problem of how the mind
interacts with the body in terms of the attribution question: Which bodies have
minds?2 At the same time that upending general assumptions about who (or
what) is minded has opened a variety of present-​day theoretical orientations or
revived historically marginalized ones, we lack a method for positively identi-
fying the precise range of bodies or types of bodies to which minds are attributed
according to each of these views, as well as the notion of “mind” that is consistent
with a view’s “attribution pattern.” An attribution pattern is a theory’s answer to
the attribution question. Absent this precision, theories that derive their explan-
atory and liberatory potentials from the radical suggestion that we must recon-
ceive status quo ontologies of the human, animal, machine, and environment
risk working against their own aims.
This chapter develops a metaphysical framework for asking and answering
the attribution question by bringing together two bodies of literature that are
traditionally kept separate, but whose joint consideration promises to advance
conversations in both areas and beyond: critical analyses of mental attribution
practices from feminist philosophy, decolonial studies, and philosophy of race
and theories of panpsychism from the philosophy of mind.3
Attending to the ways that critical social theories describe the mental attri-
bution and disattribution of bodies belonging to people who have been subject
to various, intersecting oppressions illuminates three different categories of at-
tribution experiences: (1) “immanence” and “nonbeing,” (2) “dehumanization,”
and (3) “objectification” and “hypermateriality.”4 The differences among these
experiences suggest that the metaphysics of mental attribution is not merely
about (1) whether a body (or set of bodies) is classified as minded or mind-
less, but also involves (2) the strength or amount of mentality/​kind of mind and
(3) the understanding of mental constitution (including causation) that is attrib-
uted to each minded body (or set of bodies). This schema leads us to identify
three components of an attribution pattern, which we will respectively refer to as
the ratio component, the comparison component, and the constitution component.
Theories of panpsychism are especially useful for thinking through the
metaphysics of mental attribution because their insistence on the ubiquity of
mentality requires us to consider mental attribution on a cosmic scale in all onto-
logical domains at the same time. Accounts of panpsychism from the philosophy
of mind thus provide ready examples of attribution patterns that map minded-
ness within the set of all bodies that exist. This chapter examines the opposing at-
tribution patterns of two types of physicalist panpsychism: Russellian physicalist
274 Body and Mind

panpsychism, espoused by David J. Chalmers, Galen Strawson, and others, and

Cavendishian physicalist panpsychism, developed by Margaret Cavendish from
1652 to 1668.5 Russellian panpsychism employs a “selective” or “exclusive” pat-
tern that attributes minds to a select set of bodies, attributes more mentality to
some minded bodies than others, and understands mental constitution in the
mechanistic terms of Newtonian physics. Cavendishian panpsychism entails an
“unrestricted” or “inclusive” pattern that attributes a mind to all bodies, sees
each mind as just as mental as every other, and understands mental constitution
in organicist terms that exceed explanation by Newtonian physics. These con-
trary metaphysical positions serve as the endpoints for a spectrum of attribution
patterns whose exclusivity or inclusivity falls somewhere between these two.
The first section of the chapter provides an overview of the similarities and
differences between Russellian and Cavendishian panpsychisms. The second,
third, and fourth sections respectively describe the ratio, comparison, and
constitution components of mental attribution with reference to the three cat-
egories of experiences discussed in critical social theories: immanence and non-
being, dehumanization, and objectification and hypermateriality. Each of these
sections then shows how Russellian and Cavendishian panpsychisms in turn
embody a selective and unrestricted approach to each component. The fifth sec-
tion mobilizes the opposing patterns of the two panpsychisms to generate a tax-
onomy of mental attribution that promises to inspire fresh theories of mind and
liberatory configurations of the social.

Russellian and Cavendishian Panpsychisms

A given theory about the nature of reality is properly labeled “panpsychism” if

it holds that mentality is ubiquitous in nature. This definition encompasses dif-
ferent types of theories that vary from one another in regard to how “mentality”
is understood. “Mentality” could signify consciousness, experientiality, sensa-
tion, perception, self-​awareness, subjectivity, intelligence, intentionality, feeling,
thought, agency, or some other mental characteristic (or combination of char-
acteristics). Not all panpsychists believe that the presence of “mentality” entails
the presence of “mind”; as this reasoning goes, a body could be made of “expe-
riential” or “mental” stuff without being conscious or having a mind insofar as
mindedness (and/​or consciousness) requires being a subject with a point of view
(Nagel 2016, 194; Strawson 2017, 381).
Physicalist panpsychism combines a belief that everything is physical with the
belief that mentality is ubiquitous. Physicalist panpsychists therefore understand
mentality as fundamentally physical and the physical as fundamentally mental
(at least in part). Both Russellian and Cavendishian panpsychisms are physicalist
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 275

panpsychisms that adopt a “dual-​perspective” view of matter that distinguishes

between its behavior or structure and its nature. Russellian panpsychism builds
from Bertrand Russell’s belief that physics tells us what matter does, but not
what it is; we have access to the former through empirical observation, but the
intrinsic constitution of matter is largely unknown to us (Russell 2014, 384).
Russellian panpsychists reason that mentality is part of the unknown intrinsic
nature of matter; specifically, they believe that at least some of the properties that
play microphysical roles such as the mass role (for example, “resisting accelera-
tion, attracting other masses”) are experiential (Chalmers 2017a, 181; 2017b, 26;
Strawson 2017, 381–​382; Goff 2019, 130–​138).
Cavendish anticipates Russell’s distinction between the structure and nature of
matter by several centuries with her own distinction between matter’s “effective
parts” and “constitutive ingredients” (Cavendish 2001, 25–​27).6 Effective parts
are individuated physical bodies, such as trees, rocks, hands, humans, horses,
fish, hearts, blood cells, and so on. These parts of nature are, as Cavendish’s mon-
iker implies, merely the effects of matter’s intrinsic constitution; they are not “the
ingredients of which nature is made up” that are the origin of nature’s motions,
actions, and forms (Cavendish 2001, 25). Although Cavendish maintains that
the nature of matter cannot be known through empirical observation, she
believes we can use reason to construct hypotheses about matter’s constitutive
ingredients that correspond with different roles or functions that matter plays
(Cavendish 2001, 99).7 Using this method, Cavendish concludes that matter
must be fundamentally mental (that is, rational, sensitive, and perceptive) such
that matter cannot exist without mind and vice versa.
Despite sharing the same basic metaphysical commitments (physicalism, pan-
psychism, and a dual-​perspective view of matter), Russellian and Cavendishian
panpsychisms require very different patterns of mental attribution. The differ-
ence stems from the different ways that they conceive of the relationship between
minds and bodies. Contrary to Russellian panpsychists, Cavendish denies that
minds are the types of things that can be (a) variably or contingently attributed
among bodies, (b) attributed in degrees of mentality with some bodies having
more or less than others, and (c) understood entirely according to the terms of
Newtonian physics. Disagreements on these points result in a selective attribu-
tion pattern in the former case and an unrestricted pattern in the latter. Let us
now take each of these issues in turn.

The Ratio Component: Equal or Unequal Attribution?

Feminist philosophers, philosophers of race, critical phenomenologists, and

other social theorists have described a number of experiences that are associated
276 Body and Mind

with the differential attribution of minds to bodies according to sex, race, class,
and other social categories. The first of these involve experiencing one’s body
(and one’s self) as that which is treated as if it lacks a mind in any meaningful
sense of the term. Two such experiences include Simone de Beauvoir’s account
of species immanence and Frantz Fanon’s description of racial nonbeing, which
are respectively linked to women’s bodies and Black bodies. Both experiences are
connected to the practice of denying minds to some types of bodies while simul-
taneously attributing minds to other types (White men’s bodies, for example),
thus establishing an unequal ratio of bodies to minds in the social order.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that sexist oppression employs a concep-
tion of woman that equates femininity with an overdetermined body and an
underdetermined mind. Man “considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison,
burdened by everything that particularizes it” and suggests that, as a result,
woman “thinks with her hormones” (Beauvoir 2010, 5). Embedded in these so-
cial meanings, woman experiences herself in terms of immanence; her body is
a means to carry out the mechanisms of species survival regardless of her own
individual will (Beauvoir 2010, 39–​44). Indeed, she is “the most deeply alien-
ated of all the female mammals” due to her social context (Beauvoir 2010, 44).
By contrast, social meanings encourage man to experience himself in terms of
the transcendent activity of consciousness, and to “[forget] that his anatomy
also includes hormones and testicles” (Beauvoir 2010, 5). Woman is thus not
attributed a mind in any meaningful sense of the term because her hormones
and uterus stand in for her brain, operating in the service of the species often
against her personal desires. Her mindlessness warrants external control and di-
rection; sexist society expects her to offer her body as a vehicle for someone else’s
desires in institutions such as heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood—​as a
sexual, domestic, or reproductive machine. Alternatively, a man’s mind fulfills
his desires through women’s bodies, extending his volition and subjectivity to
bodies that are not his own. In sum, sexism requires woman to be a body without
a mind (immanence) and man to be a mind that is not necessarily tied to his
body (transcendence).8
Although different from the experience of species immanence, the phenom-
enon of racial nonbeing is also tied to a logic that denies minds to certain types of
bodies while attributing minds to other types. Describing his experience of being
a Black body in a racist and White supremacist social order, Fanon distinguishes
between “a feeling of inferiority” and “a feeling of not existing” (Fanon 2008,
118). Lewis Gordon, Sylvia Wynter, and others connect this feeling of nonex-
istence with White people failing to recognize that Black people have minds,
desires, and experiential interiority. As Gordon explains, antiblack racism
“demands [that] the black body . . . be a body without a perspective” (Gordon
1999, 102). Conversely, antiblack racism understands White bodies as sources
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 277

of an outward perspective that does not see its own body being seen by others
in the third person (Gordon 1999, 103). The experience of racial nonbeing is re-
lated to this practice of withholding minds from Black bodies and withholding
bodies from White minds whenever White supremacy is furthered by this ar-
rangement.9 Wynter likens Fanon’s experience of racial nonbeing to Haitian
Vodunist descriptions of “being transformed into a zombie,” which is a process
that creates a body without a soul, personality, or will (Wynter 2001, 33). In both
cases (racism and zombification), the threat of losing one’s perspective and one’s
self, of being determined from the outside, ironically works to regulate behavior
and discipline bodies into specified social functions (Wynter 2001, 34).
These accounts of species immanence and racial nonbeing point to the first
and most basic component of a mental attribution pattern, namely, the ratio of
minded to mindless bodies that is consistent with a given conception of mind.
Imagine a metaphysical map that has a point for each body that presently exists.
The ratio component of mental attribution designates the proportion of these
points that have minds. Physicalist panpsychisms, which would not permit a
mind to exist without a body (but may permit a body to exist without a mind),
illustrate this component with two categories of responses:

(1) Of all the bodies that exist, each and every body has a mind (or mentality).
(ratio of bodies to minds: 1:1)
(2) Of all the bodies that exist, some bodies have minds (or mentality) and
some do not. (ratio of bodies to minds: >1:1)

Option 1 represents equal attribution because the ratio of minds to bodies is

equal: it attributes a mind to each and every body. Option 2 is indicative of une-
qual attribution because there are more bodies than minds: only some bodies in
the set are attributed minds.10
Insofar as we understand “panpsychism” according to the standard interpre-
tation of the term, namely, that all things have mind, we might assume that any
physicalist panpsychism must subscribe to equal attribution. However, this as-
sumption does not apply to the contemporary landscape in the philosophy of
mind, where the most popular versions of panpsychism uphold an unequal at-
tribution ratio, generally allowing for a wide swath of bodies that lack minds
(or mentality). We can make sense of a panpsychism that recognizes mindless
bodies in nature by appealing to the dual-​perspective view of matter embraced
by Russellian panpsychisms. A Russellian panpsychist affirms the presence of
mentality at the level of matter’s intrinsic constitution while denying the pres-
ence of mind (or mentality) of certain macro-​level bodies. Strawson, for instance,
emphatically refuses the suggestion that tables, forks, and similarly inert objects
are conscious even though he maintains that the nature of the matter of which
278 Body and Mind

they are made is “entirely experiential” (Strawson 2017, 381). As he explains, “the
natural distinction [between the conscious and the nonconscious] is entirely
valid in its everyday deployment: tables and chairs and trains are not conscious”
(Strawson 2017, 381). Thomas Nagel and Chalmers likewise refrain from attrib-
uting minds to certain physical bodies, such as rocks, lakes, blood cells, and the
Eiffel Tower (Nagel 2016, 194–​195; Chalmers 2017b, 19).
Despite also assuming a dual-​perspective view of matter, Cavendishian pan-
psychism draws a different conclusion in regard to the necessity of the relation-
ship between minds and bodies. Mind, on Cavendish’s view, is a body’s capacity
to perceive those entities with which it is in material proximity, to know its
place in this nexus of relationships, and to respond accordingly but not neces-
sarily mechanistically. Cavendish reasons that nature would not be what it is,
exhibiting change, variety, and interactions among bodies, if each and every one
of these bodies were not fundamentally perceptive. She explains:

Perception is an exterior knowledge of foreign parts and actions; and there

can be no commerce or intercourse, nor no variety of figures and actions; no
productions, dissolutions, changes, and the like, without perception: for how
shall parts work and act, without having some knowledge or perception of each
other? (Cavendish 2001, 15)

Cavendish therefore insists that “it is not only the five organs in an animal, but
every part and particle of his body, that has peculiar knowledge and perception”
(Cavendish 2001, 140). Because bodies are necessarily extended and located in
space and time such that no entity can occupy the same place as another phys-
ically and historically, there is never an exact similarity or repetition of form or
position among distinct bodies, and, thus, there is never an exact repetition be-
tween perspectives. Nature therefore consists in “infinite particulars” (Cavendish
2001, 102). Mindedness takes an infinite variety of forms that corresponds to
each particular, from a membrane perceiving which particles to let across and
which to block, to a bee pollinating the yellow flower and not the pink one, to
humans reflecting on their existential situation. Cavendishian panpsychism
therefore upholds an equal attribution ratio that sees each and every body from
particle, lodestone, or tree to honeybee, horse, or human as a mind of its own.
Beauvoir’s and Fanon’s descriptions of species immanence and racial non-
being have led us to identify the ratio component of a mental attribution pattern.
Considering possible answers to the ratio component reveals that Russellian
panpsychism advances an unequal ratio of bodies to minds, while Cavendishian
panpsychism entails an equal one. This discrepancy reflects their disagreement
about whether minds are the types of things that can be contingently attrib-
uted to bodies, with Russellian panpsychists taking the affirmative position and
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 279

Cavendish maintaining that bodies are necessarily minded. The second compo-
nent of mental attribution is about whether minds are the types of things that
come in degrees (or whose mentality can otherwise be ordered hierarchically),
with some minds attributed more or less mentality than others depending on the
bodies with which they are associated.

The Comparison Component: Attribution by Kind

or Degree?

Immanence and nonbeing are not the only experiences that critical social
theorists connect with practices of mental attribution. Aníbal Quinajo and María
Lugones describe a specific kind of dehumanization tied to colonized peoples in
the Americas that construes their bodies as animal and bestial, and that therefore
designates their minds as less rational than those of the colonizers. Frantz Fanon
and Sylvia Wynter evoke a similar, but also different, sense of dehumanization in
their critiques of biological conceptions of the human that position White people
as the most evolved of all and consequently deem the minds of Black people as
less rational and less human. Whereas immanence and nonbeing have to do
with being denied a mind altogether, dehumanization in both of these accounts
involves one’s body being marked as having less of a mind (or less mentality)
than other bodies in the social sphere.11
Feminists and critical social theorists have long noted connections between
systems of domination and the hierarchical ranking of minds according to sex,
race, class, nationality, and other bodily categories. These arrangements are fu-
eled by a notion of the human that understands full humanity in terms of full
mentality, and that in turn understands full mentality in terms of Whiteness,
maleness, able-​bodiedness, the possession of wealth, and European cultural
practices. In his study of the colonization of Latin America, Quijano explains
that “from the Eurocentric perspective, certain races are condemned as inferior
for not being rational subjects. They are objects of study, consequently bodies
closer to nature” (Quijano 2000, 555). Lugones expands upon Quijano’s account
by attending to the relationship between coloniality and modern concepts of
gender and heterosexuality. While the minds of White European women were
believed to mirror their fragile bodies and thus were thought of as weaker than
those of White European men (but still human), the minds of the colonized were
seen as lesser than the colonizers’ minds for a different reason: colonized people
were viewed as laborers and resources and so their bodies were not gendered in
human terms (Lugones 2007, 202–​203). As Lugones explains, “The behaviors of
the colonized and their personalities/​souls were judged as bestial and thus non-​
gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful. . . . Hermaphrodites,
280 Body and Mind

sodomites, viragos, and the colonized were all understood to be aberrations of

male perfection” (Lugones 2010, 743). For both Quijano and Lugones, dehu-
manization accompanies attributions of being more “primitive,” “animal,” and
agendered and thus less mental, rational, and human.
Fanon’s and Wynter’s conceptions of dehumanization underscore the role
of scales of biological and psychological development in establishing White
supremacist notions of the human. Fanon recounts how, upon moving from
Martinique to France, he learned the racializing logic that “the more the black
Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—​i.e., the closer
he comes to becoming a true human being” (Fanon 2008, 2). Substituting the
language of the colonized with the settler’s language is part of the dehuman-
izing process that “turns [the native] into an animal” (Fanon 1963, 42). This
linguistic spectrum from least White to most White takes hold in European
culture through psychological theories that “represent the black man as
the missing link in the slow evolution from ape to man” (Fanon 2008, 1). In
Wynter’s terms, this aspect of racism has “ ‘totemized’ being fully human
(i.e. the ostensibly farthest from the primates and thereby the most highly
evolved)” (Wynter 2001, 35).12 Such models encourage White men and others
who purportedly occupy the superlative points on the spectrum to experi-
ence their minds and bodies as representative of the “fullness and genericity of
being human” insofar as they compare them with the presumed deficient men-
tality associated with the bodies of Black people, women, and people of color
(Wynter 2001, 40).13
These descriptions of dehumanization point to a second component of
mental attribution that overlays the ratio component. After the ratio compo-
nent circumscribes the set of bodies that have minds, the comparison component
indicates how much or how little mentality to attribute to each of these minded
bodies in comparison with the others. An approach to the comparison compo-
nent that entails that the minds (or mental states) of some bodies display more
mentality than those of other bodies is appropriately labeled degree attribu-
tion. Contrary to degree attribution, kind attribution holds that any one mind
(or mental state) is just as mental (or conscious, experiential, and so on) as any
other; minds are different from one another in kind and not in their comparative
strengths of mentality (or mindedness). Both degree and kind attribution can
be applied to differences between individual bodies or to differences between
groups and categories of bodies.
On the surface, panpsychism (and specifically physicalist panpsychism) does
not seem predisposed to one mode of comparison over another when it comes
to mental attribution. However, in their attempts to describe the mentality of
the fundamental constituents of reality such as electrons and quarks and to ac-
commodate the ideas of “biologically evolved experientiality” and evolutionary
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 281

complexity, most contemporary panpsychists appeal to degree attribution

(Strawson 2020, 320).14 As Philip Goff explains:

Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice
less so again. . . . [T]‌his continuum of consciousness fading while never quite
turning off carries into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having
almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly
simple nature. This is what panpsychists believe. (Goff 2020)

Goff ’s description applies well to the Russellian panpsychisms espoused by

Nagel, Chalmers, Strawson, and Luke Roelofs, who respectively characterize the
mentality of the fundamental constituents of reality as “less subjective,” “much
simpler,” “primitive,” and “rudimentary” in comparison with that of conscious
organisms (Nagel 2016, 194; Chalmers 2017b, 24–​25; Strawson 2020, 323;
Roelofs 2019, 78). This model is also at play in William Seager’s emergentist
panpsychism, which “reflects . . . the growth of mentality in correlation with the
increasing complexity of physical systems” (Seager 2017, 234). Contemporary
panpsychists likely conceive of this degree scale in terms of species-​types or
entity-​types rather than individuals, and would not rank members of the same
species or particle-​type as having more or less of a mind than others of that
same type. They may also pursue a “threshold” approach that attributes mind
and mental phenomena such as consciousness, subjectivity, concept formation,
representation, and agency not in stronger or weaker concentrations at each
and every degree, but only once a specific degree of evolutionary or physiolog-
ical complexity is achieved. In this case, degree attribution yields hierarchical
differences in qualities or kinds of minds.
Cavendishian panpsychism rejects the idea that mentality and mindedness
come in degrees, whether comparing individual bodies or species categories.
Minds are not like shades of blue; they are not the sorts of thing that can be more
or less concentrated, diluted, faded, developed, simple, complex, and evolved.
According to Cavendish’s ontology, a honeybee’s perception of the world does
not amount to a lesser (or greater) mentality than human perception; it is in-
stead a different mental capacity suited to the distinctive corporeality (“figure”)
and unique relational location (perspective) of the bee vis-​à-​vis other bodies.
Cavendish explains:

We cannot say a bird is a more perfect figure than a beast, or a beast a more
perfect figure than a fish, or worms; neither can we say man is a more perfect
figure than any of the rest of the animals: the like of vegetables, minerals, and
elements; for every several sort has as perfect a figure as another, according to
the nature and propriety of its own kind or sort. . . . [F]‌or there is no such thing
282 Body and Mind

as most or least perfect, because there is no most nor least in nature. (Cavendish
2001, 204; emphasis added)

There is no most nor least in nature because nature consists in an infinite variety
of corporeal forms that embody infinite perceptive, sensitive, and epistemic cap-
acities. The strength of perception and sensation does not augment or diminish
as physical complexity does; it changes in kind. It is not the type (or arrangement
or complexity) of a body that makes a mind, but the bare presence of a body of
any sort because a body—​any body—​is a perspective, that is, a unique manner
of perceiving, sensing, and knowing the world. Nature’s radical variety of bodies
amounts to a radical variety of minds, with each body being just as minded as
any other.
Critical social theorists’ descriptions of the relationship between dehuman-
ization and mental attribution highlights how mental attribution is not merely
about recognizing bodies as minded or mindless. Mental attribution also
involves attributing more, less, or equal mentality (or mindedness) to some
bodies in comparison with others. Russellian and Cavendishian panpsychisms
exemplify different approaches to the comparison component. The former sees
mental attribution as a matter of degree depending on the body type with which
it is associated, while the latter insists that each body and body type is just as
mental as every other. This difference reflects different understandings of what
makes a mind, which in turn reflects different conceptions of the physical em-
ployed in different physicalist panpsychisms. The third component of mental
attribution focuses on how mental constitution (including causation) is under-
stood in relation to physical or bodily constitution (including causation).

The Constitution Component: Attributing Organicist or

Mechanistic Minds?

Many social theorists have criticized the tendency to think about the constitu-
tion of minds in the same ways that we think about the constitution of objects,
machines, and matter. Ecofeminists Carolyn Merchant and Val Plumwood have
observed that the bodies of laborers, women, colonized peoples, nonhuman ani-
mals, and the environment are readily objectified in a global, capitalist economy;
the minds that are attributed to them can be manipulated by external forces,
substituted for one another, and reduced to the operation of their parts.15 More
recently, Black feminist theorists analyze the ways that Black femininity figures in
social imaginaries as a hypermateriality that enables the reduction and appropri-
ation of Black women’s minds and bodies. Both phenomena connect practices of
mental attribution to mental constitution: objectification and hypermateriality
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 283

involve one’s body being attributed a mind whose constitution is equated with a
physical constitution that operates according to Newtonian mechanics.
Merchant’s poignant phrase “the death of nature” refers to the historical
transition from animist, organicist, and vitalist conceptions of matter as living,
moving, and internally motivated to the Newtonian paradigm that sees matter
as a collection of dead particles acted on by external forces (Merchant 1980,
193). In the seventeenth century and beyond, the mechanistic idea that bodies
are “passively determined vehicles of larger forces” facilitated the growing cap-
italist economy and its joint need to dominate nature and laborers in a social
world that was becoming more egalitarian (Plumwood 1993, 122; Merchant
1980, 194, 287). Knowing how to manipulate matter by developing products and
technologies was a way of gaining social and economic power. In this context,
conceiving of certain categories of bodies as closer to nature than others implied
that the minds associated with these bodies were more “material”—​more like
objects than subjects, and thus more in need of direction and domination. As
Merchant explains, “Nature, women, blacks, and wage laborers were set on a new
status as ‘natural’ and human resources for the modern world system” (Merchant
1980, 288). Plumwood associates this “stripping out of agency” with “a partic-
ular atomistic account of causation which later became enshrined in Newtonian
physics” (Plumwood 1993, 125). Not all minds, however, were attributed an at-
omistic constitution governed by Newtonian causation. The minds attributed to
the bodies of wealthy White male Europeans were understood to consist of a
nonextended, immaterial substance that would render them free, unique, and
irreducible to the workings of matter, or, at the very least, less susceptible to
dictates of their material bodies (Quijano 2000, 555).
Also concerned with relationships between mental attribution and ideas
about physical constitution, Black feminist theorists have described and resisted
the ways that the Black female body is viewed as the limit case of materiality
with reference to concepts and metaphors from physics, including those of the
black hole, dark matter, chaos, sublimation, superposition, the void, the plenum,
determinacy, universality, and causality. For example, Denise Ferreira da Silva
connects the devaluation of Black lives to the ways that the materiality of black-
ness is conceived in modern thought. Black lives exist in the social imaginary
as “content without form, or materia prima—​that which has no value because
it exists (as ∞) without form” (Ferreira da Silva 2017, 9). The infinity and inde-
terminacy of Black materiality does not register in a modern world that links
moral value with the operations of universal reason, Newtonian causality, and
self-​determination. Ferreira da Silva reveals a logic that interprets differences in
economic status between White Europeans and colonized and enslaved peoples
as “the effects of particular bodily arrangements, which are established as the
causes for particular mental (moral and intellectual) traits, which are themselves
284 Body and Mind

expressed in the social configurations found across the globe” (Ferreira da Silva
2017, 8). This etiology that grounds differences in the social order in mental
differences, which are in turn traced to differences in bodily constitution,
generates the category of blackness as a justification and obfuscation of violence
perpetrated through slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. And yet, because it is
imagined as a hypermateriality that exceeds the modern values of determinacy
and efficient causality, blackness also exposes this hidden racial violence and calls
for liberatory physics and ontologies. As an act of resistance against the view that
would understand the constitution of Black women’s minds in Newtonian terms
as the effects of their physical parts and causes of their social status, Black fem-
inist scholars invoke the image of “Black (w)holes,” an irreducible perspective
that founds Black feminist creativity and potential (Hammonds 1994; Bradley
2016). Zakkiyah Iman Jackson suggests that such metaphors “alert us to and per-
form a critique of the logic of microfundamentalism,” a metaphysical view that
reduces mind and world to the predictable behavior of fundamental particles
(Jackson 2018, 638).
These descriptions of objectification and hypermateriality show how ideas
about what a mind is made of come to bear on the type of mind and mental
capacities attributed to certain bodies. Janine Jones explains, “Excess and/​or
hypercorporeality indicates that a mind has failed to set limits and order on its
body: it is, par excellence, a nonrational mind” (Jones, this volume, 87). Unlike
their engagements with the ratio and comparison components of mental attri-
bution, contemporary panpsychists have discussed mental constitution ex-
tensively, focusing on two aspects specifically: (1) whether the experiences of
macrolevel bodies are grounded in the experiences of microphysical entities,
and (2) whether the experiences of microphysical entities combine to form the
experiences of macrolevel bodies (Chalmers 2017a). The current discussion adds
a third consideration that derives from critical social theorists’ analyses of mental
attribution and is especially relevant to physicalist panpsychisms: (3) whether
mental constitution is conceived entirely in the terms of a Newtonian concep-
tion of the physical. Although the label “mechanistic” can be interpreted in a
number of ways, when we refer to mechanistic attribution we mean to indicate
the practice of attributing to a body a mind with an atomistic, Newtonian con-
stitution, which understands minds as the types of things that can be summed
and/​or decomposed and explained entirely by a causality amenable to classical
mechanics. On the contrary, organicist attribution is the practice of attributing
to a body a mind with an irreducible constitution that cannot be composed or
decomposed according to smaller parts and whose causality is at least partly
explained by a non-​Newtonian mechanics. Notably, organicist attribution does
not entail a rejection of physics, nor does it necessarily deny Newtonian views
of bodily constitution. According to this definition, Niels Bohr’s description of
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 285

the metaphysical implications of quantum phenomena such as nonlocality and

complementary is consistent with organicist ideas of mental constitution: recog-
nizing these phenomena leads to “the necessity of a final renunciation of the clas-
sical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem
of physical reality” (Bohr 1935, 697).
The distinction between mechanistic and organicist attribution calls for
panpsychists to be more explicit about how they understand the relationships
between empirical findings in physics, metaphysical views about bodily con-
stitution, and metaphysical views about mental constitution. Russellian
panpsychists favor mechanistic attribution; they reason that if minds are phys-
ical, and the physical consists of particles governed by efficient causality, then
mental constitution must also be atomistic and causal in the same way that
bodily constitution is atomistic and causal. Russellian panpsychism entails that
microexperiences (the experiences of microphysical particles such as quarks
and electrons) combine to form macroexperiences (the experiences of humans,
horses, and other organisms). Its proponents believe that minds are the types
of things that can be composed or decomposed. Moreover, Chalmers maintains
that “microphenomenal properties . . . play the most fundamental causal roles in
physics” (Chalmers 2017b, 29; 2017a, 181). He suggests that macroexperience
inherits causal relevance from microexperience in the same manner that a bil-
liard ball inherits causal relevance from its constituting particles; insofar as the
one constitutes the other, causal relevance can transfer between them (Chalmers
2017b, 29). To the extent that Russellian panpsychists challenge the atomistic in-
terpretation of the physical or understand the causality of experiences as par-
tially recalcitrant to the terms Newtonian mechanics, they will lean away from
a mechanistic notion of mental attribution. Roelofs, for example, admits that
it may turn out that the world is “infinitely divisible, displaying no identifi-
able ‘basic parts,’ ” but he nonetheless insists that we should operate according
to a Newtonian model that recognizes the ontological independence of cells,
molecules, and atoms (Roelofs 2019, 77).
Whereas the imagination of contemporary physicalist panpsychists is neces-
sarily influenced by the dominance and pervasiveness of Newtonian conceptions
of the physical, Cavendish’s position as Newton’s contemporary who published
her major works in natural philosophy before he published his renders her views
especially useful for envisioning a non-​Newtonian materialist panpsychism.
Cavendish rejects the idea that the intrinsic nature of matter consists in micro-
physical entities. Atomism and materialism are incompatible on Cavendish’s
view because all material bodies are divisible, no matter how small or large
(Cavendish 2001, 125). She criticizes atomistic philosophers for “[making] an
universal cause, of a particular effect: for no particular part or action [effective
part], can be prime in nature, or a fundamental principle of other creatures or
286 Body and Mind

actions” (Cavendish 2001, 113). Instead, Cavendish imagines matter’s intrinsic

constitution as a plenum that is constantly in motion—​a nondiscrete field whose
infinite, particular motions at the intrinsic level are the cause and basis of nature’s
effects, that is, the individuated bodies and minds that we encounter at the level
of experience.16 Because each body/​perspective/​mind is a result of the collective,
relational motions and actions of the material plenum, a human’s experience is
no more grounded in the experiences of fundamental particles than it is in those
of whales or honeybees. Cavendish writes:

Those parts that are composed into the figure of an animal, make perceptions
proper to that which figures corporeal, interior, natural motions; but, if they
be dissolved from the animal figure, and composed into vegetables, they make
such perceptions as are proper for vegetables; and being again dissolved and
composed into minerals, they make perceptions proper to minerals, etc. so that
no part is tied or bound to one particular kind of perception, no more than it is
bound to one particular kind of figure. (Cavendish 2001, 166)

In other words, minds are not the types of things that combine or decom-
pose; they transform. When the corporeal shape of a body is augmented or
reduced, its perspective is not augmented or reduced accordingly. Instead,
each new corporeal configuration instantiates a new kind of mind that is like-
wise non-​composable and irreducible. While the causality implicated by clas-
sical mechanics may well apply to the effective parts of matter (including atoms
and particles), the causalities that operate at the level of matter’s constitutive
ingredients and underlie mental causation require a different physics that treats
matter as a whole, which fills all space and therefore lacks individuation and po-
sition, but is nonetheless in motion (Cavendish 1664, 98–​100).17 Cavendishian
panpsychism is therefore illustrative of organicist attribution that sees mental
constitution as irreducible and mental causation as an entangled, holistic cau-
sation different from the interactions of individuated bodies. Cavendish’s meta-
physics is thus aptly described as a “carnal monadology” where the constitution
of matter as a nondiscrete field does the harmonizing work among infinite par-
ticular perspectives that God performs in a Leibnizian universe.18
Analyses of objectification and hypermateriality by Merchant, Plumwood,
Ferreira da Silva, Jackson, and other feminist theorists reveal an intimacy between
understandings of mental constitution and mental attribution. In the social order,
minds with constitutions amenable to the workings of Newtonian mechanics are
attributed to certain bodies, while minds with irreducible constitutions are attrib-
uted to others. We gain a clearer picture of the difference between Newtonian
and non-​Newtonian approaches to mental attribution by studying the different
ways that Russellian and Cavendishian panpsychisms imagine the intrinsic
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 287

nature of matter. On the one hand, Russellian panpsychism takes a mechanistic

approach to mental attribution that understands mental constitution in terms of
Newtonian atomism and Newtonian causality. On the other hand, Cavendishian
panpsychism’s organicist attribution insists upon the irreducibility of minds and
admits of mental causality that exceeds Newtonian causality.

A Taxonomy of Mental Attribution Patterns

Examining critical social theorist’s analyses of mental attribution in regard to the

bodies of women, Black people, colonized peoples, laborers, and others led us
to identify three metaphysical components of mental attribution: the ratio com-
ponent, the comparison component, and the constitution component. We then
turned to examples of physicalist panpsychisms to illustrate at least two different
ways of approaching each respective component: equal and unequal ratios,
kind and degree comparisons, and mechanistic and organicist constitutions.
Russellian panpsychism exhibits a selective pattern that attributes minds to some
bodies (unequal), designates comparatively more (or less) mentality to certain
of these (degree), and explains mental constitution in the atomistic, causal terms
of Newtonian mechanics (mechanistic). Alternatively, Cavendishian panpsy-
chism is consistent with an unrestricted pattern that attributes a mind to each and
every body (equal), maintains that any one mind is just as mental as any other
(kind), and understands minds as fundamental in themselves and in excess of
the workings of Newtonian causality (organicist).
The opposing patterns consistent with Russellian and Cavendishian
panpsychisms establish two endpoints that frame a spectrum of answers to the at-
tribution question—​Which bodies have minds?—​from the most selective mental
attribution pattern to the least selective. Adding up the possible combinations of
approaches to the ratio, constitution, and comparison components yields eight
possible attribution patterns that could be entailed by a given theory of mind:

Unequal Attribution Patterns Equal Attribution Patterns

(a) unequal degree mechanistic (UDM) (e) equal degree mechanistic (EDM)
(b) unequal kind mechanistic (UKM) (f) equal kind mechanistic (EKM)
(c) unequal degree organicist (UDO) (g) equal degree organicist (EDO)
(d) unequal kind organicist (UKO) (h) equal kind organicist (EKO)

The attribution patterns of Russellian and Cavendishian panpsychisms are re-

spectively represented by the extremes: types (a) and (h). We could expand
this arrangement further to twenty-​four types of attribution patterns if we
288 Body and Mind

also factored in three basic metaphysical positions: materialism, idealism, and

dualism.
This taxonomy of mental attribution patterns is a tool that promises to ad-
vance and expand theories of panpsychism, critical social theories, and views
about the mind generally. In the first place, it reveals that most contemporary
panpsychisms are not as radical about attribution as their name implies. Insofar
as panpsychism’s potential to address long-​standing problems in the philosophy
of mind, such as the mind-​body problem and the problem of consciousness, lies
in its radical and economical approach to mental attribution, panpsychisms that
embrace selective attribution patterns are likely to walk back this advantage.
Selective patterns often reflect ontotheologic residues from the Cartesian con-
text that birthed the problems in the first place, such as a belief in a contingent
connection between mind and body or a mechanistic interpretation of matter.
Moreover, seeking alternatives to dominant attribution patterns led to the re-
covery of an unrestricted physicalist panpsychism from the history of philos-
ophy that can be weighed against contemporary views. To borrow a quip from
Strawson, Cavendishian physicalist panpsychism is really realistic about panpsy-
chism; it is real panpsychism—​panpsychism that attributes a complete mind to
each and every body, all the way down and in between.

Thinking in terms of the metaphysics of attribution patterns can expand crit-

ical social theories because an attribution pattern considers mental attribution
in human, animal, vegetable, and mineral domains at the same time, and thus
draws our attention to the ways that ideas about one category of bodies are re-
lated to practices of mental attribution that are applied to other categories. This
taxonomy also highlights how the different components of a mental attribution
pattern can work together to maintain systems of domination. Fanon expresses
this synergy when he writes, “So they were countering my irrationality with ra-
tionality [unequal attribution], my rationality with the ‘true rationality’ [degree
attribution]. I couldn’t hope to win” (Fanon 2008, 111). In addition, recognizing
the different components of mental attribution and the different ways that they
can be combined to form an attribution pattern enables feminists and other
critical social theorists to make fine-​grained phenomenological distinctions
between different experiences of oppression and resistance. According to the
views discussed in this chapter, the experience of immanence is not the same as
hypermateriality in part because they involve different components of mental
attribution, and experiences of objectification that go by the same name can be
distinguished based on the different practices of mental attribution that com-
prise them. The metaphysics of mental attribution can thus support critical
social theorists in retaining phenomenological specificity in their analyses by sit-
uating experiences within their descriptive, personal, and ontological contexts
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 289

so that the heterogeneity of our resistances is not erased and the freedom of some
beings is not imagined in ways that entrench the oppression of others. Although
the taxonomy of mental attribution patterns developed here is a tool that can
be applied to different problems and literatures, its purpose is to generate more
theoretical contextualization, precision, and specificity, as well as inter-​and
intradisciplinary dialogues and collaborations.
Beyond feminism and panpsychism, it is likely that the attribution ques-
tion and this taxonomy of possible answers will inspire fresh thinking about
our conceptions of the relationship between mind and body and their role in
establishing ontologies of the human, animal, machine, and environment that
organize the social sphere. Attending to the patterns of mental attribution at
stake in twenty-​first-​century research programs such as artificial intelligence,
new materialisms, assemblage theory, environmental studies, panpsychism, and
others is a way of making explicit metaphysical and political commitments so that
they can be subjects of conversation, debate, and critique. Most important, the
attribution question spurs us to revise our “imaginative picture[s]‌of matter [and
mind]” in ways that lead to greater theoretical innovation and liberatory potential
(Russell 2014, 382). Collectively imagining metaphysical pictures that challenge
conventional ways of thinking can help us “break away from the enclosures of
modern thought” that limit both the explanatory capacities of our theories and
the social and practical possibilities of our lives (Ferreira da Silva 2017, 1).
This chapter has posed the question of mental attribution in metaphysical
terms: Which bodies have minds? The attribution question is not orthogonal to
the question that has historically been at the heart of philosophy of mind: What
is the mind? On the contrary, views about who (or what) has a mind entail views
about whether minds are the types of things that can exist without bodies, be
more or less mental, compose and decompose into simpler or more complex
minds, and operate according to a causality explained by Newtonian mechanics.
Metaphysical contemplation is neither apolitical nor ahistorical, nor is it a
practice that is inconsequential to the social and political possibilities of beings
who inhabit a world structured by multiple, intersecting oppressions. Readers
who have been trained to cleanly separate fact from value, the descriptive from
the normative, objective from subjective, exteriority from interiority, and the
metaphysical from the social may be inclined to resist the complexity of the attri-
bution question by appealing to philosophical divisions of labor that mirror these
separations. But twenty-​first-​century life frustrates such divisions at every turn
with its landscapes of conscious objects and objectified humans, global flows of
knowledge and capital, and diverse social movements that illuminate and inspire
liberatory ways of thinking, living, and being. Different from the individualist
epistemological problem of other minds, the attribution question calls us to sit-
uate accounts of what the mind is and how minds and bodies interact in terms
290 Body and Mind

of a broader social, political, economic, and relational nexus that is invested in

particular patterns of attributing and disattributing minds (and mentality) to
certain categories of bodies. Here we find that not all views of mind are equal
when it comes to explaining mental phenomena, nor are all conceptions of mind
equally egalitarian when it comes to instantiating liberatory configurations of
the social. The task of a feminist philosophy of mind is to hold both desiderata at
the same time.

Notes

1. This chapter benefited greatly from conversations with Janine Jones, Keya Maitra, Jay
Garfield, Matt MacKenzie, and Anand Vaidya.
2. See also Harfouch (2018), who shows how Immanuel Kant’s association of certain psy-
chological characteristics with bodies of certain races is central to the historical devel-
opment of the mind-​body problem in the philosophy of mind.
3. This chapter resists the disciplinary habit of thinking of these areas as mutually exclu-
sive. Many feminist philosophers are also decolonial theorists, many philosophers of
race are also philosophers of mind, and so on.
4. Different theorists, writing from different contexts, often describe these experiences
differently even if they call them by the same name. My interpretations of the
experiences of mental attribution and disattribution discussed in this chapter are
linked to contexts developed by the critical social theorists cited here and cannot nec-
essarily be transposed to others.
5. For overviews of Cavendish’s philosophy, see Cunning (2016) and Boyle (2018).
6. That contemporary philosophers of mind working to articulate a viable form of physi-
calist panpsychism have looked to Leibniz, Spinoza, and Russell rather than Cavendish
is both curious and unfortunate, given that her panpsychism possesses the desirable
elements of the men’s systems but has the added virtue of being materialist already (not
to mention that it predates the others).
7. Cavendish recognizes three ingredients: rational, sensitive, and inanimate matter.
Each ingredient tends toward a different respective effect, such as structural integ-
rity, swiftness, slowness, perception, or sensation. However, thinking of these types of
matter as spatially distinct “parts” would be incorrect because matter’s ingredients are
“completely blended” in the sense that one cannot exist independently of the others
(Cavendish 2001, 16, 24, 34–​35; 1996, 252). The Stoic view that matter has both ac-
tive and passive principles that are completely mixed in nature has obvious parallels
in Cavendish’s system, as does the concept of pneuma, a creative, moving fire that is
present in all things, albeit with three varying degrees of intensity: hexis, physis, and
psyche. See O’Neill (2001, xxi–​xxxii).
8. The applicability of Beauvoir’s phenomenological descriptions of immanence and
transcendence to social locations and bodies that are not White, bourgeois, and
European is widely debated. See, for example, Jones (2019).
 Which Bodies Have Minds? 291

9. Cf. Harfouch, who defines racial nonbeing as a “mind-​body union without reason”
(2018, xiii).
10. For simplicity’s sake, I will not take up the fascinating possibilities that no bodies
are attributed minds (0:≥1) and that bodies can be attributed more than one mind
(1:>1).
11. Cf. Mikkola, who understands dehumanization differently (2016, 146–​185).
12. For more on the relationships among the concept of race, racism, and evolutionary
theory, see Gould (1981) and Zack (2002).
13. See also Taylor (2015).
14. Many philosophers of mind would dispute the ideas that evolutionary adaptation
yields degree scales and/​or is teleological. See, for example, Millikan (1984).
15. Cf. Cahill, who emphasizes the difference between objectification and derivitization
(2011).
16. Cavendishian panpsychism is not cosmopsychism because the nondiscrete plenum
lacks an individuated body and thus a mind: “nature is not a deity” (Cavendish 2001,
13). Cf. Itay (2015).
17. On Cavendish’s views of causality and freedom, see Detlefsen (2007). Although this
remains to be argued, I believe Cavendish’s materialist panpsychism is compatible
with quantum holism. Her view anticipates, for example, that of David Bohm, who
recognizes two distinct “orders” of reality (Bohm and Hiley 1993, 9).
18. For more on “carnal monadology,” see McWeeny (2019, 133).

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 16
Sexual Orientations
The Desire View
E. Díaz-​León

Talk about sexual orientations is widespread in our society and our culture: it
occurs in the media, in political debates, in religion, in the natural and social sci-
ences, and in fiction.1 But very few analytic philosophers have paid attention to
questions about the nature of sexual orientation, such as what sexual orientations
are, what “sexual orientation” means, and whether sexual orientations re-
ally exist. Some important exceptions include Edward Stein (1999), Cheshire
Calhoun (2002), William Wilkerson (2013), and Robin Dembroff (2016).
In this chapter, I examine four main theories about the nature of sexual
orientations that are available in the recent and growing literature on this topic,
including behaviorism, ideal and ordinary versions of dispositionalism, struc-
turalism, and views according to which sexual orientations are mental states
such as sexual desires. I discuss several objections to these views, and I will de-
velop and defend a new version of the view that characterizes sexual orientations
in terms of sexual desires.
Before we start, it will be useful to clarify the methodology that we are going
to use, that is, we should get clearer about what questions are our main focus
here, and what methods are the most useful for approaching those questions.
Following Sally Haslanger and others, I will distinguish between two different
projects in philosophy (Haslanger 2006). On the one hand, we have the descrip-
tive project, which seeks to reveal the concept we actually use, that is, the or-
dinary concept associated with the corresponding term, which is known as the
“operative concept.” On the other hand, we have the ameliorative or conceptual
engineering project, which seeks to reveal the concept that we ought to use given
certain purposes, that is, the concept that would best serve certain aims and
goals, which may or may not correspond to the operative concept. This is known
as the “target concept.” My ultimate aim in this project is to reveal the target con-
cept, that is, the concept of sexual orientation that would best serve the aims and
goals of sexual orientation talk. But in order to know which concept we ought to
use, it will be useful to know first which concept we are actually using. In the first
part of the chapter, I will focus on the descriptive project, which in my view is a

E.Díaz-​León, Sexual Orientations In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0017
 Sexual Orientations 295

necessary step in the search for the target concept, and, in the second part of the
chapter (the fifth section), I will make some preliminary remarks concerning the
ameliorative project, which I hope to be able to develop fully in the future.
Dembroff also makes clear that the ultimate goal of their project is to re-
veal a concept of sexual orientation that can satisfy certain political aims
(Dembroff 2016). In particular, Dembroff argues that our target concept of
sexual orientation should be as close as possible to the original concept in
order to facilitate communication, but it may depart in some ways from the
ordinary concept in order to fulfill some other political aims. We should also
distinguish between the property that the concept of sexual orientation picks
out (which we can initially characterize as the property of being attracted to
people of one’s same or different sex or gender), and the extension of this pro-
perty, that is, the entities or groups that satisfy that property (for example, the
group of men who are attracted to men, the group of women who are attracted
to women, and so on).

The Sex/​Gender Distinction

On a preliminary characterization, sexual orientation has to do with the sex and/​

or gender of the people one is sexually attracted to. Therefore, in order to have a
clear characterization of sexual orientation, it would be useful to have a working
characterization of “sex” and “gender.”
According to a standard conception, “sex” refers to biological or anatomical
features, whereas “gender” refers to social or cultural features. In this way, being
male and being female are two types of sex, whereas being a man and being a
woman are two types of gender. The crucial question for our purposes here is
the following: Should we characterize sexual orientations in terms of attraction
to people of a certain sex, or of a certain gender, or both? In order to answer this
question, we would need to answer a prior, difficult question: What is “sex” and
what is “gender”?
Both Stein and Dembroff aim to be neutral regarding the nature of sex and
gender in their characterizations of sexual orientation. For example, Stein
says: “To leave these various issues unresolved, I use the term sex-​gender to
encompass both sex and gender as standardly used. Sex-​gender includes all
the characteristics (biological, psychological, cultural, etc.) that are supposed
to distinguish males/​men from females/​women” (Stein 1999, 33). That is, he
introduces a new notion by stipulation, namely, “sex-​gender,” which is supposed
to refer to the combination of all markers of biological sex plus all the markers
of gender (independently of whether the connection between them turns out to
be biologically constrained or socially constructed). Similarly, Dembroff claims:
296 Body and Mind

An account of sexual orientation should be sensitive to the fact that individuals

may be sexually attracted to persons with various sex/​gender combinations. . . .
I purposively build this flexibility into my account in order to construct a con-
cept of sexual orientation (and of its taxonomy) that can be structurally pre-
served even when the number or understanding of recognized sex and gender
categories undergoes shift. (Dembroff 2016, 10–​11)

That is to say, not only do we want a characterization of sexual orientation that

has a placeholder for different notions of gender and/​or sex, as Stein suggests, but
we should also allow the possibility that people can be attracted to individuals
with several sex/​gender combinations. In this way, Dembroff extends the scope
of Stein’s neutral characterization (and allows that sex and gender might turn out
to be distinct kinds). Appeals to “sex-​gender” in the characterizations of sexual
orientation that follow should be understood in this spirit.

Behaviorism and Dispositionalism about Sexual Orientation

According to behaviorism, “a person’s sexual orientation is determined solely

by their observable sexual behavior” (Dembroff 2016, 12). Both Dembroff
(2016) and Stein (1999) argue that behaviorism does not seem to capture our
ordinary notion of sexual orientation. The main problem has to do with the idea
that there can be individuals who engage in behaviors that do not express their
sexual desires. For example, we can think of individuals who repress their sexual
orientations so that they do not act on their real sexual desires, or do not even
realize that they have those desires (that is, these individuals could be ignorant
of, or mistaken about, their own sexual desires). On the other hand, we could
have individuals who engage in some behaviors because of coercion or societal
pressures, not in virtue of their sexual desires. Finally, we can have cases of indi-
viduals who have chosen to be celibate for personal or religious reasons but can
be said to have a sexual orientation. Intuitively, these seem to be cases where
someone’s behavior does not express their “true” sexual orientation. Therefore,
sexual orientation cannot consist merely in their sexual behavior.
Given the problems facing behaviorism, it seems more plausible to say that
someone’s sexual orientation does not consist in the behaviors she actually
engages in, but rather in the behaviors she is disposed to engage in, that is to say,
in the behaviors she would engage in, given certain manifesting conditions. As
Dembroff puts it, “dispositionalism,” as a general view, is the view that “a person’s
sexual orientation is determined solely by what sex[es] and gender[s]‌of persons
S is disposed to sexually engage under certain stimulating circumstances” (2016,
13). Stein characterizes dispositionalism as follows:
 Sexual Orientations 297

According to [the dispositional view], a person’s sexual orientation is based on

his or her sexual desires and fantasies and the sexual behavior he or she is dis-
posed to engage in under ideal conditions. If a person has sexual desires and
fantasies about having sex primarily with people of the same sex-​gender and
is inclined under ideal circumstances to engage in sexual acts primarily with
such people, then that person is homosexual. Conditions are ideal if there are
no forces to prevent or discourage a person from acting on his or her desires,
that is, when there is sexual freedom and a variety of appealing sexual partners
available. (Stein 1999, 45)

The crucial question in order to properly characterize dispositionalism is how

to characterize the relevant manifesting conditions. That is, not any disposition
to have sex with women, say, will entail that a person is attracted to women. The
relevant, sexual-​orientation-​determining dispositions will be only those that are
expressed in the relevant manifesting conditions. But how could we identify those?
Dembroff interprets Stein’s position in terms of the manifesting conditions
being ideal conditions, that is, ideal circumstances where there are no forces
preventing someone from acting on her desires. More precisely, Dembroff
characterizes Stein’s ideal version of the dispositional view in the following way:

Ideal dispositionalism: A person’s sexual orientation is determined solely by

what sex[es] and gender[s]‌of persons S is disposed to sexually engage under
ideal conditions. (Dembroff 2016, 14)

Dembroff ’s main worry regarding ideal dispositionalism is that it is difficult to

characterize ideal conditions in a way that is free from counterexamples but is
not completely vacuous.2 For example, the following would be a trivial charac-
terization of the manifesting conditions that define “flammability”: the match
has the disposition to light if and only if, if the match were struck, the match
would light unless it didn’t light (Dembroff 2016, 15).
In response to this problem, Sungho Choi argues that we should examine
the purposes behind our ordinary concept of a given disposition (such as
flammability), and this will reveal what manifesting conditions are conceptu-
ally connected to that disposition (Choi 2008). Drawing on Choi’s suggestion,
Dembroff proposes the following characterization of manifesting conditions:

In the case of sexual orientation . . . the manifesting conditions for the behav-
ioral dispositions relevant to determining sexual orientation must be under-
stood within the framework of the purposes behind the everyday operative
concept of sexual orientation. . . . These purposes determine the “ordinary”
conditions under which the term is applied. (Choi 2016, 16)
298 Body and Mind

That is, in order to characterize the manifesting conditions that are relevant for
sexual orientations, Dembroff believes that we should take into consideration
the purposes of our ordinary concept of sexual orientation. Why do we ascribe
sexual orientations? Answering this question will be illuminating for discerning
the relevant manifesting conditions that should appear in a characterization of
the relevant dispositions that determine someone’s sexual orientation. Dembroff
calls this version of dispositionalism, based on Choi’s account of dispositions,
“ordinary dispositionalism.” According to Dembroff, reflecting on the ordinary
application conditions of our concept of sexual orientation reveals the following
conceptual constraints:

(1) The operative concept assumes attraction to persons of a certain sex or

gender (at least partially) because they are that sex and/​or gender.
(2) The operative concept assumes attraction to certain persons while having
a reasonable diversity of potential sexual partners.
(3) The operative concept assumes that one is willing and able to sexually en-
gage with other persons. (Dembroff 2016, 17)

In this way, Dembroff clarifies the manifesting conditions for the relevant
behavioral dispositions that determine our sexual orientations. Moreover,
Dembroff emphasizes that a characterization of sexual orientation should ap-
peal to different possible combinations of sex and/​or gender. They thus arrive
at the following characterization of ordinary dispositionalism about sexual
orientations:

Bidimensional dispositionalism: A person S’s sexual orientation is grounded in

S’s dispositions to engage in sexual behaviors under the ordinary condition[s]‌
for these dispositions, and which sexual orientation S has is grounded in what
sex[es] and gender[s] of persons S is disposed to sexually engage under these
conditions. (Dembroff 2016, 18)

The ordinary conditions for the relevant dispositions are given by conditions
(1)–​(3) (or whatever turns out to be the right account of the ordinary conditions
for the application of the concept of sexual orientation). This version of the dis-
positional view is known as “bidimensional dispositionalism” (BD) since it ap-
peals to two dimensions of attraction, namely, the sex(es) and the gender(s)
of the person(s) the subject is attracted to (which may be distinct or not). As
Dembroff says:

BD understands sexual orientation solely in terms of the sex[es] and gender[s]‌

of the persons one is disposed to sexually engage, without reference to the sex
 Sexual Orientations 299

or gender of the person so disposed. . . . It also removes the connotation that

“sexual orientation” is what distinguishes (e.g.) the so-​called “straight” and
“queer” communities. I believe that this is a socially and politically beneficial
result. (Dembroff 2016, 19)

In the next section, I will discuss some objections to this view, understood as a
descriptive account of the ordinary concept of sexual orientation. In the final sec-
tion, I also raise some worries for this view insofar as it aims to contribute to the
ameliorative project. I will argue that this concept does not satisfy some moral
and political aims that a revised concept of sexual orientation should satisfy.

Objections to Bidimensional Dispositionalism

I will introduce two counterexamples that show that the bidimensional dispo-
sitional account offered by Dembroff cannot capture the ordinary concept of
sexual orientation. Thinking about these objections will lead us to a new version
of the dispositional account of the ordinary concept of sexual orientation.
Alicia is a bisexual woman who has decided to be in a long-​term monogamous
relationship with her male partner. Being monogamous is a central feature of her
character, and therefore it seems plausible to assume that in all the relevant close
possible worlds, she would not have sex with people, including other women,
other than her male partner. That is to say, in all those possible worlds that are
relevantly similar to the actual one, she is also similar regarding this central as-
pect of her personality, namely, she is in a monogamous relationship with her
male partner. In all of these possible worlds, she satisfies the relevant manifesting
conditions according to Dembroff ’s constraints above, that is, she is willing to
have sex and she has a reasonable diversity of potential sexual partners available,
but her behavior in those worlds still does not seem to fully capture her sexual
desires, since she is not disposed to have sex with anyone other than her male
partner. My conjecture is that it seems intuitive to say that this person is sexu-
ally attracted to both men and women, given the content of her sexual desires,
even if she does not engage in sexual activities with women in any of the relevant
possible worlds. Therefore, it’s not clear that bidimensional dispositionalism can
capture Alicia’s sexual orientation in the ordinary sense of this notion, that is, the
sexual orientation that ordinary speakers would attribute to her.
Perhaps it could be argued that we should also take into account possible
worlds where she is single, or she has a female partner, or she doesn’t want to be
monogamous. But then we should include these conditions in order to define
manifesting circumstances. Perhaps, though, this point contradicts the letter of
Dembroff ’s account but not its spirit, since this seems to follow Choi’s suggestion
300 Body and Mind

that we should focus on our ordinary concept of a certain disposition in order

to figure out the relevant manifesting conditions. It could thus be argued that
the counterexample just helps us to further develop the relevant manifesting
conditions. However, the problem for Dembroff ’s version of dispositionalism
goes deeper than this. In what follows, I will present a second counterexample
that shows that there is a dilemma for bidimensional dispositionalism here, and
that it seems that no version of the dispositional account of sexual orientations
that attempts to characterize them in terms of behavioral dispositions could sat-
isfy both horns of the dilemma at the same time.
Cary is a man who identifies as being attracted mostly to women but is such
that in close possible worlds he wants to experiment and engages in some spo-
radic sexual activities with men. Intuitively, this person would be classified as
heterosexual in the actual world, or so I would want to argue. But it’s not clear
that Dembroff ’s account can capture this intuition. According to the example,
in those close possible worlds where Cary engages in some sexual activities with
men, the relevant manifesting conditions are satisfied, that is, the subject has a
reasonable diversity of potential partners available and willingness to engage in
sex, and so on. But we would still say, intuitively, that this person is heterosexual,
even if he is disposed to have sex with men in some close possible worlds.
The main worry for bidimensional dispositionalism can be put in the form of
a dilemma: if we understand the account loosely enough, then we can count pos-
sible worlds where Alicia is not monogamous and has sex with women as being
relevant for determining her sexual orientation, and then the account would
rightly capture the intuition that she is bisexual. But if we take this approach,
then there seems to be no way of ruling out possible worlds where Cary feels like
experimenting and has sex with some men, so the account could not capture
the intuition that Cary is heterosexual. On the other hand, if we understand the
relevant manifesting conditions more narrowly, and restrict the possible worlds
to those where Cary doesn’t feel like experimenting with men, then we should
also restrict the possible worlds to those where Alicia is in a monogamous re-
lationship with her male partner, but then Alicia would count as heterosexual,
not bisexual. In sum, I don’t see any way of modifying the account so that it can
accommodate both counterexamples at the same time.
At this point, some readers might have the feeling of déjà vu: this dialec-
tical situation seems familiar. It is similar to problems encountered by philo-
sophical behaviorism about the mental, defended by Gilbert Ryle and others in
the first half of the twentieth century (Ryle 1949). Let me briefly summarize a
story familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory course in philosophy of
mind: classical behaviorism about the mental attempted to define mental states
in terms of a subject’s actual behavior, or somewhat more nuanced, in terms of
our dispositions to behave in certain ways, given certain inputs. But this project
 Sexual Orientations 301

was doomed to fail. As most philosophers of mind in the second half of the twen-
tieth century would agree, we cannot define a mental state M in terms of certain
behavior B given circumstances C, because there is no determinate behavior that
a subject undergoing M would manifest, given circumstances C, independently of
other mental states. That is, we cannot explicate a mental state in terms of the con-
nection of that mental state with some inputs (perceptual inputs, for example)
and some outputs (behavioral outputs), in the absence of other mental states. We
can only formulate conditionals like the following: “If subject S is in mental state
M, and mental states m1, m2, m3 . . . mn, and there is input X, then S will do A.” The
additional mental states are ineliminable, or so it has been argued.3
Likewise, it seems contrary to our intuitions to define someone’s sexual ori-
entation just in terms of the behavior she would engage in, given such and
such circumstances, because it seems that the behavior she would engage in,
given those circumstances, essentially depends on what other mental states
she has (for instance, whether she wants to be monogamous, or whether she
feels like experimenting, and so on). That is to say, two subjects with the same
sexual orientations but different mental states could engage in different sexual
behaviors in the same manifesting circumstances. Moreover, two subjects with
different sexual orientations could engage in the same sexual behavior in the
same manifesting circumstances insofar as they possess different mental states.
This similarity between the problems for (dispositional) behaviorism about
the mental and bidimensional dispositionalism about sexual orientations gives
us some indirect evidence that perhaps we have similar problems here be-
cause in both cases we are trying to define mental states in terms of behavioral
dispositions. These problems for the dispositional account of sexual orientations
provide some indirect motivation for the view that sexual orientations are iden-
tical to certain mental states, and if so, it would not be surprising that we cannot
define them just in terms of the disposition to engage in certain behaviors given
certain inputs, independently of other mental states, since this is a worry for any
attempt to analyze mental states in terms of behavioral dispositions more gen-
erally. In the following section, I develop in more detail the view that sexual
orientations are identical to mental states.

The Desire View

Recall Stein’s formulation of dispositionalism: “According to [the disposi-

tional view], a person’s sexual orientation is based on his or her sexual desires
and fantasies and the sexual behavior he or she is disposed to engage in under
ideal conditions” (Stein 1999, 45; emphasis added). As we can see, Stein wants
to characterize sexual orientation in terms of behavioral dispositions and sexual
302 Body and Mind

desires and fantasies. My claim is that these sexual desires and fantasies cannot
be reduced to the sexual behavior someone is disposed to engage in under ideal
conditions, independently of other mental states that she has.
Here I want to discuss the following conjecture: we could understand sexual
orientations in terms of sexual preferences, where a sexual preference is under-
stood as a complex mental state. In this section, I will explain how I understand
preferences in general, and sexual preferences in particular.
Preferences are dispositional mental states. In particular, I under-
stand preferences as dispositions to instantiate certain desires and feelings.
The central question for our purposes is: How can we characterize sexual
preferences? I suggest that we can understand a sexual preference in terms
of the dispositions to have sexual desires under the relevant manifesting
conditions (as opposed to the dispositions to engage in certain kind of sexual
behaviors). Therefore, my suggestion is that we characterize sexual orienta-
tion in terms of sexual preference, and sexual preference in terms of a dis-
position to have sexual desires of certain kinds, given certain manifesting
conditions. We can call my proposed view of sexual orientations “the desire
view,” which we can characterize a bit more precisely in terms of a new ver-
sion of dispositionalism:

Dispositionalism*: A person S’s sexual orientation is determined by the sex[es]

and/​or the gender[s]‌of persons for whom S is disposed to have sexual desires,
under the relevant manifesting conditions.

A remaining question in order to flesh out this account is: What is sexual de-
sire? According to a standard conception of desires, a desire is a propositional
attitude of the form “subject S bears the attitude of desiring toward proposition
p.” Therefore, a sexual desire could be understood in terms of the desire that cer-
tain propositions about sexual activities be the case, such as the proposition that
S has sex with some men (or some women), or men (or women) in general. But
some problems arise: this formulation doesn’t seem to capture our ordinary con-
cept of sexual desire. For instance, S might have the desire to have sex with a
certain person in order to get paid, or to win a bet, or in order to cheer them up,
and so on, but intuitively S still bears the attitude of desiring to the proposition
that S has sex with such and such, even if this is not motivated by sexual arousal
in those cases. Therefore, having a propositional attitude of the form “S desires
that S has sex with such and such” is not sufficient for instantiating sexual desire
in the relevant sense. What is missing is the connection with some specifically
sexual experiences, such as sexual arousal and sexual pleasure. Stein provides a
formulation along these lines:
 Sexual Orientations 303

A desire is sexual to the extent that it involves (in the appropriate way) the
arousal of the person who has the desire. . . . By arousal, I do not mean the var-
ious physiological manifestations of arousal . . . but the psychological state of
being aroused. (Stein 1999, 69)

This seems very plausible to me: sexual desire is a mental state that is somehow
connected with some experiences such as sexual arousal (which is typically cor-
related with the physiological state of arousal but is not identical to it).
In my view, we should distinguish between standing mental states such as
beliefs or desires, which are dispositional and are not always manifested; and
occurring mental states, which enter into the stream of consciousness during a
certain interval of time and are necessarily conscious and manifested. It seems
intuitive to say that sexual desire is a standing mental state (for example, someone
could be attracted to another person, say her partner or her lover, during a long
period of time, and this does not mean that she is experiencing arousal during
the whole period), whereas sexual arousal per se is an occurring mental state, be-
cause it is necessarily conscious. On the other hand, a person can be said to have
sexual desires for women, or for men, even when she is not conscious of it, for in-
stance when she is dreamlessly sleeping or suffering excruciating pain, and so on.
Following Stein, I will distinguish between the experience of sexual arousal
as an occurring mental state, and the physiological state of sexual arousal. (We
can similarly distinguish between the mental state of pain and the physiological
state of tissue damage, or the experience of orgasm and the physiological state of
orgasm.) A crucial question remains: What is the relation between sexual desire
and the experience of sexual arousal? As we have seen, if we understand sexual
desires as standing mental states, then they do not necessarily involve the expe-
rience of sexual arousal at all times, but there is still a connection. Here I want to
suggest the following hybrid view of sexual desires for men and/​or women (or
the relevant sex/​gender combination):

Hybrid View: A sexual desire (for men and/​or women, or people of certain sex
and/​or gender) involves the combination of a propositional attitude (of the
form “S bears the relation of desiring toward proposition p”) plus a disposition
to be sexually aroused by, or sexually attracted to, men and/​or women.4

In my view, it can be useful to distinguish between an intentional and a causal

reading of this characterization of sexual desire. According to the causal reading,
S experiences sexual attraction that is caused by (the perception of, or interac-
tion with) people of certain sex(es) or gender(s); whereas according to the inten-
tional reading, S experiences sexual attraction toward people of certain sex(es)
304 Body and Mind

or gender(s) because they are represented as having certain sex(es) or gender(s).

The intentional interpretation assumes that the relevant mental state is accom-
panied by a representation of certain people as having a certain sex or gender
(which could be false). Arguably, this representation could have conceptual con-
tent, as in the case of beliefs or thoughts, or nonconceptual content, as in the case
of perceptual experiences or mental imagery. I am sympathetic to the intentional
reading, but, for our purposes here, I will leave this qualification open.
An interesting question that I have left out so far is how my account would
deal with the cases of Alicia and Cary above. In the case of Alicia, it is clear my
account would predict that she is attracted to both men and women, since she is
disposed to have desires for both men and women. The case of Cary is a bit more
complicated: it seems that he is also disposed to experience sexual arousal with
respect to both men and women in the relevant possible worlds, but we wanted
to save the intuition that he is heterosexual. In my view, we could argue that Cary
lacks the dispositions to have sexual desires for men in the relevant manifesting
conditions, since he is not disposed to experience sexual arousal with respect to
men in the relevant conditions, even if he has the propositional attitude to have
sex with men in some contexts (because he wants to experiment), so he wouldn’t
count as bisexual on my account, which seems to be the right result.
It could be argued that sexual desire does not need to involve a propositional
attitude of this form, since, for instance, a celibate person S does not seem to have
the propositional attitude of desiring that S has sex with anyone, although she can
have sexual desires for men or for women. Moreover, a monogamous bisexual
person whose partner is a man, say, could have sexual desires for women even if
she does not seem to have the attitude of desiring that she has sex with women,
given that she is monogamous. In response, I would argue that these subjects
do have these propositional attitudes, but they also have propositional attitudes
with the opposite content, so that they have contradictory attitudes (even if, all
things considered, the desire not to have sex with such and such people trumps
the desire to have sex with some people). In my view, the cases of the celibate
person and the monogamous person are different from the case of an asexual
person, who does not seem to have the attitude of desiring that she has sex with
anyone at all (or at least not in virtue of her sexual desires: she might have the
desire to have sex with some people in virtue of her desire to make money or to
cheer someone up). On the other hand, the mere feeling of sexual arousal does
not seem sufficient to capture the ordinary notion of sexual desire: someone
could be sexually aroused by different people, but this does not seem sufficient to
say that this person is attracted to, or has desires for, such and such people, in the
absence of a propositional attitude with the appropriate content.
To sum up: in this section I have provided an account of the ordinary concept
of sexual orientation in terms of S’s sexual preferences, and I have characterized
 Sexual Orientations 305

sexual preference in terms of S’s dispositions to instantiate certain sexual desires

in certain manifesting conditions. Furthermore, I have characterized the relevant
sexual desires as complex mental states composed of a propositional attitude of
the form “S desires that S has sex with such and such people” plus the disposition
to instantiate certain sexual experiences about certain kinds of people (or caused
by certain kinds of people).

The Ameliorative Project: In Search of the Target Concept

As we have seen, Dembroff ’s proposed concept of sexual orientation can do

a lot of explanatory work, and can satisfy several important political desid-
erata. But in my view it fails to satisfy an important desideratum, namely, it
does not provide categories that capture the similarity between those people
who identify as male/​men and are attracted to other males/​men, and those
who identify as female/​women and are attracted to other females/​women.
And I believe that it is politically useful to have concepts that make this sim-
ilarity salient since this is an important dimension of discrimination that is
politically useful to emphasize, to wit, these two communities occupy sim-
ilar social positions regarding many factors such as cultural representations,
access to marriage benefits, housing, healthcare, and so on. However, the
new taxonomy suggested by Dembroff cannot easily capture these common
patterns of discrimination. And those who are either male/​men and are (only)
attracted to female/​women, or female/​women who are (only) attracted to
males/​men have some similar privileges that this new taxonomy cannot cap-
ture either. For all these reasons, I conclude that it would be useful to have
a concept of sexual orientation according to which these are determined by
the sex(es) and/​or gender(s) of people one is attracted to, and also by one’s
own sex and/​or gender. Therefore, I want to suggest that the following dispo-
sitional concept of sexual orientation is more useful politically than the one
defended by Dembroff:

Dispositionalism**: A person S’s sexual orientation is determined by the sex(es)

and/​or the gender(s) of persons for whom S is disposed to have sexual desires
under the relevant manifesting conditions, plus S’s own sex and/​or gender.

In addition, this new characterization seems closer to the ordinary concept of

sexual orientation, given that the distinction between “same-​sex” and “opposite-​
sex” attraction seems to be part of the folk taxonomy of sexual orientation
(although Dembroff is right that these labels can help to promote a binary con-
ception of sex and gender as discrete categories, which is problematic).
306 Body and Mind

It could be argued that for the purpose of achieving social justice, a “struc-
tural” view of sexual orientations could be the most useful. By “structural,”
I mean a kind of view similar to the accounts of gender and race that social
constructionists such as Haslanger and others have offered. Haslanger provides
a characterization of gender and race in terms of occupying certain positions
within certain social structures of privilege and subordination:

A group G is a gender (in context C) iffdf its members are similarly positioned
as along some social dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) (in C)
and the members are “marked” as appropriately in this position by observed or
imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of reproductive capacities
or function.
A group G is racialized (in context C) iffdf its members are similarly posi-
tioned as along some social dimension (economic, political, legal, social,
etc.) (in C), and the members are “marked” as appropriately in this position
by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of ancestral
links to a certain geographical region. (Haslanger 2003, 252–​53)

Likewise, we could offer a characterization of sexual orientations in terms of so-

cial hierarchies, as follows:

A group is a sexual orientation (in context C) iffdf its members are similarly
positioned as along some social dimension (economic, political, legal, social,
etc.) (in C) and the members are “marked” as appropriately in this position by
observed or imagined features presumed to be evidence of a disposition to be
sexually attracted to (or engage in sexual behavior with) people with the same
or different sex assigned at birth.

A difficulty immediately arises: this structural view doesn’t seem to capture

the self-​identification of some trans men and trans women, and therefore it
is problematic. For instance, a trans woman who doesn’t pass as a ciswoman
and who is attracted to ciswomen would not count as having the same sexual
orientation as a ciswoman who is attracted to other ciswomen.5 This ac-
count does not seem to capture the relevant patterns of discrimination in
this realm. For example, I believe that trans women who identify as lesbians
and ciswomen who identify as lesbians are discriminated against in ways that
are similar and should be recognized as being relevantly similar.6 Therefore,
I believe that the structural account of sexual orientations characterized
above could satisfy some important political desiderata but would also fail
to satisfy some central ones, such as doing justice to the self-​identification of
trans women.7
 Sexual Orientations 307

Dembroff has argued that a concept of sexual orientations based on someone’s

dispositions to instantiate certain sexual desires (as opposed to dispositions to
engage in certain kinds of sexual behavior) is politically problematic. They write,
“For these purposes, someone with the psychological features of a ‘heterosexual’
but queer behavioral dispositions can and should be protected from anti-​queer
prejudice” (Dembroff 2016, 21). That is to say, Dembroff suggests that what is
politically relevant is someone’s behavior, rather than her sexual desires and fan-
tasies. I agree that someone’s manifest behavior can be a focus of discrimina-
tion and stigma, so it is important to capture this. But at the same time, I also
believe that someone with queer desires and fantasies who doesn’t act on them
(for instance, because she is repressed, or coerced into “heterosexual” beha-
vior, or is not disposed to engage in “same-​sex” behavior because of religious or
health reasons) should also be protected from antiqueer prejudice. These people
could also suffer discrimination, for example if they do not see their desires and
experiences represented in society, or if they feel that, were they to express their
desires, they would be stigmatized. So just having certain desires is enough to
suffer discrimination and prejudice in the form of invisibility and isolation, in
a way that is similar enough to those who are discriminated because of their
sexual behavior. In my view, this pattern of similarity seems politically relevant
and worth emphasizing. This is why I believe that a concept of sexual orienta-
tion based on someone’s sexual preferences is more politically useful than a con-
cept based on someone’s dispositions to engage in sexual activities given certain
inputs, independently of her other mental states.
In this chapter, I have compared several characterizations of sexual orienta-
tion, and I have argued that the following characterization best captures the or-
dinary concept:

Dispositionalism**: A person S’s sexual orientation is determined by the sex(es)

and/​or the gender(s) of persons for whom S is disposed to have sexual desires
under the relevant manifesting conditions, plus S’s own sex and/​or gender.

Relatedly, I have characterized sexual desire (for people with a certain sex and/​or
gender) as follows:

Hybrid View: A sexual desire (for men and/​or women) involves the combina-
tion of a propositional attitude (of the form “S bears the relation of desiring
toward proposition p”) plus a disposition to be sexually aroused by, or sexually
attracted to, men and/​or women.

We have also discussed some possible benefits and harms of different concepts
of sexual orientation, including several versions of dispositionalism and the
308 Body and Mind

structural account. In my view, all these different concepts do some important

explanatory work and capture important political desiderata. More work is
needed in order to investigate the ordinary concept of sexual orientation in dif-
ferent communities, and which concept of sexual orientation is the most politi-
cally useful, a consideration that could vary from context to context, depending
on the relevant moral and political aims at issue.

Notes

1. This work has been funded by grants RYC-​2012-​10900 and FFI2015-​66372-​P. I have
presented ancestors of this chapter at the Universities of Barcelona, Colorado Boulder,
Michigan, Rutgers (via Skype), San Francisco State, and Stockholm, and at the Central
APA in Chicago. I am very grateful to the audiences in all those occasions, especially
Saray Ayala, Carolina Flores, Dan López de Sa, Meena Krishnamurthy, Rebecca Mason,
and Cat Saint-​Croix, for their useful feedback. Extra thanks to Robin Dembroff and
Erin Mercurio for being my commentators at Stockholm and Chicago respectively,
and for very helpful discussions.
2. See also Choi (2008).
3. See Heil (2012) for a summary of this line of argument, and Ashwell (2014) for an ap-
plication of the argument to the case of desires in particular.
4. Here I focus on sexual desires that involve the sex and/​or gender of the person(s) one
is attracted to, given that our purpose is to capture the ordinary concept of sexual ori-
entation. I do not intend to suggest that this is a central feature of our sexual desires in
general, or that we cannot have sexual desires that are centered around other features.
5. A trans person is someone who does not identify with the sex that was assigned at
birth. A cis person is someone who does identify with the sex that was assigned at birth.
6. See Jenkins (2016) for a similar objection to Haslanger’s account of gender.
7. See Saul (2012), Bettcher (2013), and Díaz-​León (2016) for similar arguments regarding
accounts of gender. Perhaps we could modify the structural account as follows: A group
is a sexual orientation (in context C) iffdf its members are similarly positioned as along
some social dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) (in C) and the members are
“marked” as appropriately in this position by observed or imagined features presumed to
be evidence of a disposition to be sexually attracted to (or engage in sexual behavior with)
people with the same or different self-​identification in terms of sex-​gender.

References
Ashwell, Lauren. 2014. “The Metaphysics of Desire and Dispositions.” Philosophy Compass
9 (7): 469–​77.
Bettcher, Talia M. 2013. “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman.’” In The Philosophy
of Sex, edited by Nicholas Powell, Raja Halwani, and Alan Soble, 233–​49. 6th ed.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
 Sexual Orientations 309

Calhoun, Cheshire. 2002. Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and
Gay Displacement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Choi, Sungho. 2008. “Dispositional Properties and Counterfactual Conditionals.” Mind
117 (468): 795–​841.
Dembroff, Robin. 2016. “What Is Sexual Orientation?” Philosophers’ Imprint 16 (3): 1–​27.
Díaz-​Léon, E. 2016. “Woman as a Politically Significant Term: A Solution to the Puzzle.”
Hypatia 31 (2): 245–​58.
Haslanger, Sally. 2003. “Future Genders? Future Races?” Philosophic Exchange 34: 4–​27.
Haslanger, Sally. 2006. “What Good Are Our Intuitions? Philosophical Analysis and
Social Kinds.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80 (1): 89–​118.
Heil, John. 2012. Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction. 3rd ed. New York:
Routledge.
Jenkins, Katharine. 2016. “Amelioration and Inclusion: Gender Identity and the Concept
of Woman.” Ethics 126 (2): 394–​421.
Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. New York: Hutchinson’s University Library.
Saul, Jennifer. 2012. “Politically Significant Terms and Philosophy of Language:
Methodological Issues.” In Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions
to Traditional Philosophy, edited by Sharon Crasnow and Anita Superson, 195–​216.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Stein, Edward. 1999. The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual
Orientations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wilkerson, William. 2013. “What Is ‘Sexual Orientation’?” In The Philosophy of Sex, ed-
ited by Nicholas Powell, Raja Halwani, and Alan Soble, 195–​213. 6th ed. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
 PART V
M E MORY A N D EMOT ION
 17
Outliving Oneself
Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity
Susan J. Brison

I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it.

—​Charlotte Delbo1

Survivors of trauma frequently remark that they are not the same people they
were before they were traumatized.2 As a survivor of the Nazi death camps
observes, “One can be alive after Sobibor without having survived Sobibor”
(Langer 1995, 14). Jonathan Shay, a therapist who works with Vietnam veterans,
has often heard his patients say, “I died in Vietnam” (Shay 1994, 180). Migael
Scherer expresses a loss commonly experienced by rape survivors when she
writes, “I will miss myself as I was” (Scherer 1992, 179). What are we to make
of these cryptic comments? How can one miss oneself? How can one die in
Vietnam or fail to survive a death camp and still live to tell one’s story? How does
a life-​threatening event come to be experienced as self-​annihilating? And what
self is it who remembers having had this experience?
How one answers these questions depends on, among other things, how one
defines “trauma” and “the self.” In this chapter, I discuss the nature of trauma,
show how it affects the self, construed in several ultimately interconnected ways,
and then use this analysis to elaborate and support a feminist account of the re-
lational self.3 On this view the self is both autonomous and socially dependent,
vulnerable enough to be undone by violence and yet resilient enough to be
reconstructed with the help of empathic others.

Trauma and the Undoing of the Self

There is a much clearer professional consensus among psychologists about what

counts as a traumatic event than there is among philosophers concerning the
nature of the self. A traumatic event is one in which a person feels utterly help-
less in the face of a force that is perceived to be life-​threatening.4 The immediate

Susan J. Brison, Outliving Oneself In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny,
Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0018
314 Memory and Emotion

psychological responses to such trauma include terror, loss of control, and in-
tense fear of annihilation. Long-​term effects include the physiological responses
of hypervigilance, heightened startle response, sleep disorders, and the more
psychological, yet still involuntary, responses of depression, inability to concen-
trate, lack of interest in activities that used to give life meaning, and a sense of a
foreshortened future. A commonly accepted explanation of these symptoms of
post-​traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is that, in trauma, the ordinarily adaptive
human responses to danger that prepare the body to fight or flee are of no avail.
“When neither resistance nor escape is possible,” Judith Herman explains, “the
human system of self-​defense becomes overwhelmed and disorganized. Each
component of the ordinary response to danger, having lost its utility, tends to
persist in an altered and exaggerated state long after the actual danger is over”
(Herman 1992, 34). When the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally
inflicted, it not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and
one’s safety in it, but it also severs the sustaining connection between the self and
the rest of humanity. Victims of human-​inflicted trauma are reduced to mere
objects by their tormenters: their subjectivity is rendered useless and viewed as
worthless. As Herman observes, “The traumatic event thus destroys the belief
that one can be oneself in relation to others” (Herman 1992, 53). Without this
belief, I argue, one can no longer be oneself even to oneself, since the self exists
fundamentally in relation to others.
How one defines “self ” depends in part on what explanatory work one wants
the concept of a self to do. Philosophers have invoked this concept in various
areas of the discipline in order to account for a wide range of phenomena. The self
is, in metaphysics, whatever it is whose persistence accounts for personal iden-
tity over time. One metaphysical view of the self holds that it is bodily continuity
that accounts for personal identity and the other, that it is continuity of memory,
character traits, or other psychological characteristics that makes someone the
same person over time. There is also the view, held by poststructuralists, among
others, that the self is a narrative, which, properly construed, is a version of the
view that psychological continuity constitutes personal identity.5 In ethics the self
is viewed as the locus of autonomous agency and responsibility and, hence, is the
subject of praise or blame. Most traditional accounts of the self, from Descartes’s
to contemporary theorists’, have been individualistic, based on the assumption
that one can individuate selves and determine the criteria for their identity over
time independent of the social context in which they are situated. In contrast,
feminist accounts of the self have focused on the ways in which the self is formed
in relation to others and sustained in a social context. On these accounts, persons
are, in Annette Baier’s words, “second persons,” that is, “essentially successors,
heirs to other persons who formed and cared for them” (Baier 1985, 84).6 In ad-
dition, the self is viewed as related to and constructed by others in an ongoing
 Outliving Oneself 315

way, not only because others continue to shape and define us throughout our
lifetimes, but also because our own sense of self is couched in descriptions whose
meanings are social phenomena (Scheman 1983).

The Embodied Self

Although we recognize other persons most readily by their perceptible, that is,
bodily, attributes, philosophers have been loath to identify the self with a body
for a host of reasons.7 A dead body cannot be said to be anyone’s self, nor can a
living, but permanently comatose, one. We do not typically use a bodily crite-
rion of identity to determine who we ourselves are, and most of us, when imag-
ining Locke’s prince, whose soul “enters and informs” the body of a cobbler,
would suppose the resulting person to be the prince (Locke 1974, 216). Some
philosophers have been concerned to show that the self can survive the death of
the body, but perhaps the primary reason philosophers have not identified the
self with the body is an ancient bias against our physical nature. Plato praised
philosophers for “despising the body and avoiding it,” and urged that “if we are
ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and con-
template things by themselves with the soul by itself ” (Phaedo II.65c–​67d). This
rejection of the body has been most apparent in the disparaging of the female
body, which has been presented as the antithesis to reason. Although, as Sara
Ruddick notes, “there is nothing intrinsically masculine about mind and objec-
tivity or anything feminine about passion and physicality, . . . philosophers have
tended to associate, explicitly or metaphorically, passion, affection, and the body
with femininity and the mind with masculinity” (Ruddick 1989, 194). How some
bodies came to be viewed as “more bodily” than others is a puzzle that Ruddick
answers by arguing that the lack of intellectual control over menstruation, preg-
nancy, labor, and nursing set such female bodily functions against reason, which
was viewed as detached, controlled, and impersonal—​that is, masculine.
Even Simone de Beauvoir, while arguing that “one is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman,” views childbirth and nursing as completely passive, and
thus dehumanizing, processes, which keep women mired in immanence
(Beauvoir 1953, 301). She suggests that “it is not in giving life but in risking life
that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in
humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills” (Beauvoir 1953,
72). Although Beauvoir rejects the conclusion that this sex difference justifies
male dominance, she nonetheless accepts the premise reducing childbirth to a
purely “animal” function.8
Beauvoir was the first female philosopher I read and, as a teenager, I shared
her disdain for (socially) compulsory marriage and maternity for women in
316 Memory and Emotion

this society. I still share her concerns about constraints on women’s reproduc-
tive freedom, but I reject her view of pregnancy and motherhood as necessarily
passive and tedious processes, even when voluntary. The work of Ruddick and
other feminists who have been redefining motherhood has led me to see the
liberatory potential in chosen maternity, childbirth, and childrearing. Reading
Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking in 1989, I recognized the ways in which my philo-
sophical training had exacerbated my preexisting tendency to value the cerebral
over the corporeal. In pursuing the life of the mind, I had accepted unthinkingly
(because unconsciously) its incompatibility with the life of the (gestating and
birthing) female body. My reading of Ruddick happened to coincide with a visit
to a gynecologist who told me that I might have difficulty conceiving and that
if I even suspected I would want to have a child someday I should start trying
now. My philosophical bias against maternity, combined with a personal (and
political) reaction against what I perceived as pressure to have a baby (as in the
words of one academic woman’s mother who said, “I’d rather be a grandmother
than the mother of a Ph.D.”) suddenly gave way to the startling realization that
I might want to experience the particular kind of embodiment and connection
pregnancy and motherhood provide, and that these things were not incompat-
ible with being a philosopher. After years of considering my body little more
than an unruly nuisance, I found myself wanting to yield up control over it, to
learn what it had to teach me, to experience the abandon of labor and childbirth,
what Margaret Walker has called “the willing or grateful surrender of ‘I’ to flesh”
(Ruddick 1989, 212).9
Plato praised those “who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny
which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that
progeny is, it is wisdom and virtue in general. . . . Everyone would prefer chil-
dren such as these to children after the flesh” (Symposium 208e–​209a, 209c–​d).
It occurred to me that this preference was not, after all, universal, and that, in
any case, one did not have to choose between pursuing wisdom and virtue, on
the one hand, and having children, on the other. My husband (who never felt as
compelled to make such a choice) and I started trying to conceive, or, rather, as a
friend put it more aptly, stopped trying not to. It was just six months later, how-
ever, that I was jumped from behind, beaten, raped, strangled, and left for dead in
a ravine. The pleasures of embodiment were suddenly replaced by the pain and
terror to which being embodied makes one prey.
I was no longer the same person I had been before the assault, and one of the
ways in which I seemed changed was that I had a different relationship with my
body. My body was now perceived as an enemy, having betrayed my newfound
trust and interest in it, and as a site of increased vulnerability. But rejecting the
body and returning to the life of the mind was not an option, since body and mind
had become nearly indistinguishable. My mental state (typically, depression) felt
 Outliving Oneself 317

physiological, like lead in my veins, while my physical state (frequently, inca-

pacitation by fear and anxiety) was the incarnation of a cognitive and emotional
paralysis resulting from shattered assumptions about my safety in the world. The
symptoms of PTSD gave the lie to a latent dualism that still informs society’s
most prevalent attitude to trauma, namely, that victims should buck up, put the
past behind them, and get on with their lives. My hypervigilance, heightened
startle response, insomnia, and other PTSD symptoms were no more psycholog-
ical, if that is taken to mean under my conscious control, than were my heart rate
and blood pressure.
The intermingling of mind and body is also apparent in traumatic memo-
ries that remain in the body, in each of the senses, in the heart that races and
skin that crawls whenever something resurrects the only slightly buried terror.
As Jonathan Shay writes in his study of combat trauma, “Traumatic memory
is not narrative. Rather, it is experience that reoccurs, either as full sensory re-
play of traumatic events in dreams or flashbacks, with all things seen, heard,
smelled, and felt intact, or as disconnected fragments. These fragments may be
inexplicable rage, terror, uncontrollable crying, or disconnected body states and
sensations” (Shay 1994, 172). The main change in the modality as well as in the
content of the most salient traumatic memories is that they are more tied to the
body than memories are typically considered to be.
Sensory flashbacks are not, of course, merely a clinical phenomenon, nor are
they peculiar to trauma. Proust describes the pleasantly vivid flashbacks brought
on by the leisurely savoring of a tea-​soaked madeleine (Proust 1981, 1:48–​49).10
Trauma, however, changes the nature and frequency of sensory, emotional, and
physiological flashbacks. They are reminiscent of the traumatic event itself, as
Shay writes, in that “once experiencing is under way, the survivor lacks authority
to stop it or put it away. The helplessness associated with the original experience
is replayed in the apparent helplessness to end or modify the reexperience once
it has begun” (Shay 1994, 174). Traumatic flashbacks immobilize the body by
rendering the will as useless as it is in a nightmare in which one desperately tries
to flee, but remains frozen.
The bodily nature of traumatic memory complicates a standard philosoph-
ical quandary concerning which of two criteria of identity—​continuous body
or continuous memories—​should be used to determine personal identity over
time. Locke’s bodily transfer puzzle in which we are asked to decide who survives
“should the soul of a prince . . . enter and inform the body of a cobbler” no longer
presents us with an either/​or choice, depending on which criterion we invoke
(Locke 1974, 116). If memories are lodged in the body, the Lockean distinction
between the memory criterion and that of bodily identity no longer holds.11
The study of trauma replaces the traditional philosophical puzzle about
whether the soul can survive the death of the body with the question of whether
318 Memory and Emotion

the self shattered by trauma can reconstitute itself and carry on in the world.
It also reveals the ways in which one’s ability to feel at home in the world is as
much a physical as an epistemological accomplishment. Jean Améry writes, of
the person who is tortured, that from the moment of the first blow he loses “trust
in the world,” which includes “the irrational and logically unjustifiable belief in
absolute causality perhaps, or the likewise blind belief in the validity of the in-
ductive inference” (Améry 1995, 126). More important, according to Améry, is
the loss of the certainty that other persons “will respect my physical, and with it
also my metaphysical, being. The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries
of myself. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have
trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. At the first blow, however, this
trust in the world breaks down” (Améry 1995, 126). Améry goes on to compare
torture to rape, an apt comparison, not only because both objectify and trauma-
tize the victim, but also because the pain they inflict reduces the victim to flesh,
to the purely physical. This reduction has a particularly anguished quality for
female victims of sexual violence who are already viewed as more tied to nature
than men and are sometimes treated as mere flesh. It is as if the tormenter says
with his blows, “You are nothing but a body, a mere object for my will—​here, I’ll
prove it!”
Those who endure long periods of repeated torture often find ways of disso-
ciating themselves from their bodies, that part of themselves which undergoes
the torture. As the research of Herman (1992) and Terr (1994) has shown, child
victims of sexual and other physical abuse often utilize this defense against an-
nihilation of the self, and, in extreme cases, even develop multiple personalities
that enable one or more “selves” to emerge unscathed from the abuse. Some adult
victims of rape report a kind of splitting from their bodies during the assault, as
well as a separation from their former selves in the aftermath of the rape.
Charlotte Delbo writes of her return from Auschwitz:

life was returned to me

and I am here in front of life
as though facing a dress
I cannot wear. (Delbo 1995, 240)

A number of Holocaust survivors, whose former selves were virtually annihi-

lated in the death camps, gave themselves new names after the war, Jean Améry
(formerly Hans Maier) and Paul Celan (formerly Paul Antschel) being among
the most well-​known. In a startling reappropriation of the name (literally)
imposed on him during his incarceration at Auschwitz, one survivor retained
and published under the name “Ka-​Tzetnik 135633,” meaning “concentration
camp inmate number 135633” (Ka-​Tzetnik 135633, 1989).12 Others were forced
 Outliving Oneself 319

to assume new names and national and religious identities (or, rather, the ap-
pearance of them) in order to avoid capture, and probable death, during the war.
The dislocations suffered by what Rosi Braidotti (1994) has called “nomadic
subjects” can be agonizing even when the migrations are voluntary or, as in the
case of Eva Hoffman (1989), whose family moved from Poland to Canada when
she was thirteen, involuntary, but unmarked by violence. Given how traumatic
such relocations can be, it is almost unimaginable how people can survive self-​
disintegrating torture and then manage to rebuild themselves in a new country, a
new culture, and a new language.
What can we conclude from these clinical studies and personal narratives
of trauma concerning the relationship of one’s self to one’s body? Does trauma
make one feel more or less tied to one’s body? That may depend on one’s ability
to dissociate. Since I, like most victims of one-​time traumatic events, did not dis-
sociate during the assault, I felt (and continue to feel) more tied to my body than
before, or, at any rate, more vulnerable to self-​annihilation because of it.13 Those
who survived ongoing trauma by dissociating from their bodies may feel that an
essential part of themselves was untouched by the trauma, but even they expe-
rience, in the aftermath, the physical intrusions of visceral traumatic memories.
These various responses to trauma—​dissociation from one’s body, separation
from the self one was either before or during the trauma—​have in common the
attempt to distance one’s (real) self from the bodily self that is being degraded,
and whose survival demands that one do, or at any rate be subjected to, de-
grading things. But such an attempt is never wholly successful and the survivor’s
bodily sense of self is permanently altered by an encounter with death that leaves
one feeling “marked” for life. The intense awareness of embodiment experienced
by trauma survivors is not “the willing or grateful surrender of an ‘I’ to flesh”
described by Walker, but more akin to the pain of Kafka’s harrow, cutting the
condemned man’s sentence deeper and deeper into his body until it destroys him
(Kafka 2009, 77–​79, 96–​98).

The Self as Narrative

Locke famously identified the self with a set of continuous memories, a kind of
ongoing narrative of one’s past that is extended with each new experience (Locke
1974). The study of trauma presents a fatal challenge to this view, since memory
is drastically disrupted by traumatic events—​unless one is prepared to accept the
conclusion that survivors of such events are distinct from their former selves.
The literature on trauma does, however, seem to support the view, advocated
by Derek Parfit, that the unitary self is an illusion and that we are all composed
of a series of successive selves (Parfit 1986).14 But how does one remake a self
320 Memory and Emotion

from the scattered shards of disrupted memory? Delbo writes of memories being
stripped away from the inmates of the death camps, and of the incomprehensibly
difficult task of getting them back after the war: “The survivor must undertake to
regain his memory, regain what he possessed before: his knowledge, his experi-
ence, his childhood memories, his manual dexterity and his intellectual faculties,
sensitivity, the capacity to dream, imagine, laugh” (Delbo 1995, 255).
This passage illustrates a major obstacle to the trauma survivor’s reconstruc-
tion of a self in the sense of a remembered and ongoing narrative about oneself.
Not only are one’s memories of an earlier self lost, along with the ability to envi-
sion a future, but one’s basic cognitive and emotional capacities are gone, or radi-
cally altered, as well. This epistemological crisis leaves the survivor with virtually
no bearings by which to navigate. As Améry writes, “Whoever has succumbed to
torture can no longer feel at home in this world” (Améry 1995, 136). Shattered
assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it can, to some extent, eventually
be pieced back together, but this is a slow and painful process. Although the sur-
vivor recognizes, at some level, that these regained assumptions are illusory, she
learns that they are necessary illusions—​as unshakable, ultimately, as cognitively
impenetrable perceptual illusions.
In addition, though, trauma can obliterate one’s former emotional reper-
toire, leaving one with only a kind of counterfactual, propositional knowledge
of emotions. When alerted to the rumors that the camp in which he was incar-
cerated would be evacuated the next day, Primo Levi felt no emotion, just as for
many months he had “no longer felt any pain, joy or fear” except in a condi-
tional manner: “If I still had my former sensitivity, I thought, this would be an ex-
tremely moving moment” (Levi 1993, 152–​153). Indeed, the inability to feel one’s
former emotions, even in the aftermath of trauma, leaves the survivor not only
numbed but also without the motivation to carry out the task of constructing an
ongoing narrative.
However, by constructing and telling a narrative of the trauma endured, and
with the help of understanding listeners, the survivor begins not only to inte-
grate the traumatic episode into a life with a before and after but also to gain
some degree of mastery over the trauma. When I was hospitalized after my as-
sault I experienced moments of reprieve from vivid and terrifying flashbacks
when giving my account of what had happened—​to the police, doctors, a psy-
chiatrist, a lawyer, and a prosecutor. Although others apologized for putting me
through what seemed to them a retraumatizing ordeal, I responded that it was
therapeutic, even at that early stage, to bear witness in the presence of others
who heard and believed what I told them. Two and a half years later, when my as-
sailant was brought to trial, I also found it healing to give my testimony in public
and to have it confirmed by the police, prosecutor, my lawyer, and, ultimately, the
jury, who found my assailant guilty of rape and attempted murder.15
 Outliving Oneself 321

How might we account for this practice of mastering the trauma through re-
peated telling of one’s story? The residue of trauma is a kind of body memory,
as Roberta Culbertson notes, “full of fleeting images, the percussion of blows,
sounds, and movements of the body—​disconnected, cacophonous, the cells
suffused with the active power of adrenalin, or coated with the anesthetizing
numbness of noradrenalin” (Culbertson 1995, 174). Whereas traumatic mem-
ories (especially perceptual and emotional flashbacks) feel as though they are
passively endured, narratives are the result of certain obvious choices (how much
to tell to whom, in what order, and so on). This is not to say that the narrator is
not subject to the constraints of memory or that the story will ring true how-
ever it is told. And the telling itself may be out of control, compulsively repeated.
But one can control certain aspects of the narrative and that control, repeatedly
exercised, leads to greater control over the memories themselves, making them
less intrusive and giving them the kind of meaning that permits them to be inte-
grated into the rest of life.
Not only present listeners but also one’s cultural heritage can determine to
a large extent the way in which an event is remembered and retold, and may
even lead one to respond as though one remembered what one did not in fact
experience. Yael Tamir, an Israeli philosopher, told me a story illustrating
cultural memory, in which she and her husband, neither of whom had been
victims or had family members who had been victims of the Holocaust, lit-
erally jumped at the sound of a German voice shouting instructions at a train
station in Switzerland. The experience triggered such vivid “memories” of the
deportation that they grabbed their suitcases and fled the station. Marianne
Hirsch (1992–​93) discusses the phenomenon of “postmemory” in children of
Holocaust survivors and Tom Segev writes of the ways in which the Holocaust
continues to shape Israeli identity: “Just as the Holocaust imposed a posthu-
mous collective identity on its six million victims, so too it formed the collec-
tive identity of this new country—​not just for the survivors who came after the
war but for all Israelis, then and now” (Segev 1993, 11). The influence of cul-
tural memory on all of us is additional evidence of the deeply relational nature
of the narrative self.
The relational nature of the self is also revealed by a further obstacle
confronting trauma survivors attempting to reconstruct coherent narratives: the
difficulty of regaining one’s voice, one’s subjectivity, after one has been reduced
to silence, to the status of an object, or, worse, made into someone else’s speech,
an instrument of another’s agency. Those entering Nazi concentration camps had
the speech of their captors literally inscribed on their bodies. As Levi describes it,
the message conveyed by the prisoners’ tattoos was “You no longer have a name;
this is your new name.” It was “a non-​verbal message, so that the innocent would
feel his sentence written on his flesh” (Levi 1989, 119).
322 Memory and Emotion

Piecing together a dismembered self seems to require a process of remem-

bering in which speech and affect converge. This working through, or remastering
of, the traumatic memory involves going from being the medium of someone
else’s (the torturer’s) speech to being the subject of one’s own. The results of the
process of working through reveal the performative role of speech acts in recov-
ering from trauma: saying something about a traumatic memory does something
to it. As Shay notes in the case of Vietnam veterans, “Severe trauma explodes
the cohesion of consciousness. When a survivor creates a fully realized narrative
that brings together the shattered knowledge of what happened, the emotions
that were aroused by the meanings of the events, and the bodily sensations that
the physical events created, the survivor pieces back together the fragmentation
of consciousness that trauma has caused” (Shay 1994, 188). But one cannot re-
cover in isolation, since “narrative heals personality changes only if the survivor
finds or creates a trustworthy community of listeners for it” (Shay 1994, 188).
Fortunately, just as one can be reduced to an object through torture, one can be-
come a human subject again through telling one’s narrative to caring others who
are able to listen.
Intense psychological pressures make it difficult, however, for others to listen
to trauma narratives. Cultural repression of traumatic memories (in the United
States about slavery, in Germany and Poland and elsewhere about the Holocaust)
comes not only from an absence of empathy with victims, but also out of an ac-
tive fear of empathizing with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowl-
edge that we are not in control of our own.
As a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been
traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by
fate to remember. As individuals and as cultures, we impose arbitrary term limits
on memory and on recovery from trauma: a century, say, for slavery, fifty years,
perhaps, for the Holocaust, a decade or two for Vietnam, several months for
mass rape or serial murder. Even a public memorialization can be a forgetting,
a way of saying to survivors what someone said after I published my first article
on sexual violence: “Now you can put this behind you.” But attempting to limit
traumatic memories does not make them go away; the signs and symptoms of
trauma remain, caused by a source more virulent for being driven underground.
And so we repeat our stories, and we listen to others.’ What Hoffman writes of
her conversations with Miriam, her closest North American friend, could also
describe the remaking of a survivor’s self in relation to empathic others: “To a
large extent, we’re the keepers of each other’s stories, and the shape of these stories
has unfolded in part from our interwoven accounts. Human beings don’t only
search for meanings, they are themselves units of meanings; but we can mean
something only within the fabric of larger significations” (Hoffman 1989, 279).
Trauma, however, unravels whatever meaning we’ve found and woven ourselves
 Outliving Oneself 323

into, and so listening to survivors’ stories is, as Lawrence Langer describes

reading and writing about the Holocaust, “an experience in unlearning; both
parties are forced into the Dantean gesture of abandoning all safe props as they
enter and, without benefit of Virgil, make their uneasy way through its vague do-
main” (Langer 1995b, 6–​7). It is easy to understand why one would not willingly
enter such a realm, but survivors’ testimonies must be heard, if individual and
cultural recovery is to be possible.
To recover from trauma, according to psychoanalyst Dori Laub, a survivor
needs to construct a narrative and tell it to an empathic listener, in order to
reexternalize the event. “Bearing witness to a trauma is, in fact, a process that
includes the listener” (Laub 1992, 70). And to the extent that bearing witness
reestablishes the survivor’s identity, the empathic other is essential to the con-
tinuation of a self. Laub writes of Chaim Guri’s film The Eighty-​First Blow, which
“portrays the image of a man who narrates the story of his sufferings in the camps
only to hear his audience say: ‘All this cannot be true, it could not have happened.
You must have made it up.’ This denial by the listener inflicts, according to the
film, the ultimately fateful blow, beyond the eighty blows that man, in Jewish tra-
dition, can sustain and survive” (Laub 1992, 68).

Remaking Oneself

A child gave me a flower

one morning
a flower picked
for me
he kissed the flower
before giving it to me . . .
There is no wound that will not heal
I told myself that day
and still repeat it from time to time
but not enough to believe it.
—​Charlotte Delbo 16

In the traditional philosophical literature on personal identity, one is considered

to be the same person over time if one can (now) identify with that person in
the past or future. One typically identifies with a person in the past if one can
remember having that person’s experiences and one identifies with a person in
the future if one cares in a unique way about that person’s future experiences.
An interesting result of group therapy with trauma survivors is that they come
to have greater compassion for their earlier selves by empathizing with others
324 Memory and Emotion

who experienced similar traumas. This, in turn, enables them to care for their
future selves. They stop blaming themselves by realizing that others who acted or
reacted similarly are not blameworthy. Rape survivors, who typically have diffi-
culty getting angry with their assailants, find that in group therapy they are able
to get angry on their own behalf by first getting angry on behalf of others (Koss
and Harvey 1991).
That survivors gain the ability to reconnect with their former selves by empa-
thizing with others who have experienced similar traumas reveals the extent to
which we exist only in connection with others. It also suggests that healing from
trauma takes place by a kind of splitting off of the traumatized self which one
then is able to empathize with, just as one empathizes with others.17 The loss of a
trauma survivor’s former self is typically described by analogy to the loss of a be-
loved other. And yet, in grieving for another, one often says, “It’s as though a part
of myself has died.” It is not clear whether this circular comparison is a case of
language failing us or, on the contrary, its revealing a deep truth about selfhood
and connectedness. By finding (some aspects of) one’s lost self in another person,
one can manage (to a greater or lesser degree) to reconnect with it and to reinte-
grate one’s various selves into a coherent personality.
The fundamentally relational character of the self is also highlighted by the
dependence of survivors on others’ attitudes toward them in the aftermath of
trauma. Victims of rape and other forms of torture often report drastically al-
tered senses of self-​worth, resulting from their degrading treatment. That even
one person—​one’s assailant—​treated one as worthless can, at least temporarily,
undo an entire lifetime of self-​esteem (Roberts 1989, 91). This effect is magni-
fied by prolonged exposure to degradation, in a social and historical context in
which the group to which one belongs is despised. Survivors of trauma recover
to a greater or lesser extent depending on others’ responses to them after the
trauma. These aspects of trauma and recovery reveal the deeply social nature of
one’s sense of self and underscore the limits of the individual’s capacity to control
her own self-​definition.
What is the goal of the survivor? Ultimately, it is not to transcend the trauma,
not to solve the dilemmas of survival, but simply to endure. This can be hard
enough, when the only way to regain control over one’s life seems to be to end
it. A few months after my assault, I drove by myself for several hours to visit a
friend. Though driving felt like a much safer mode of transportation than
walking, I worried throughout the journey, not only about the trajectory of
every oncoming vehicle but also about my car breaking down, leaving me at the
mercy of potentially murderous passers-​by. I wished I’d had a gun so that I could
shoot myself rather than be forced to live through another assault.18 Later in my
recovery, as depression gave way to rage, such suicidal thoughts were quickly
quelled by a stubborn refusal to finish my assailant’s job for him. I also learned,
 Outliving Oneself 325

after martial arts training, that I was capable, morally as well as physically, of
killing in self-​defense—​an option that made the possibility of another life-​
threatening attack one I could live with. Some rape survivors have remarked on
the sense of moral loss they experienced when they realized that they could kill
their assailants (and even wanted to!), but I think that this thought can be seen as
a salutary character change in those whom society does not encourage to value
their own lives enough.19 And far from jeopardizing their connections with a
community, this newfound ability to defend themselves, and to consider them-
selves worth fighting for, enables rape survivors to move among others, free of
debilitating fears. It was this ability that gave me the courage to bring a child into
the world, in spite of the realization that doing so would, far from making me im-
mortal, make me twice as mortal, as Barbara Kingsolver put it, by doubling my
chances of having my life destroyed by a speeding truck (Kingsolver 1989, 59).
But many trauma survivors who endured much worse than I did, and for
much longer, found, often years later, that it was impossible to go on. It is not a
moral failing to leave a world that has become morally unacceptable. I wonder
how some can ask, of battered women, “Why didn’t they leave?” while saying, of
those driven to suicide by the brutal and inescapable aftermath of trauma, “Why
didn’t they stay?” Améry wrote, “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured” and this
may explain why he, Levi, Celan, and other Holocaust survivors took their own
lives decades after their (physical) torture ended, as if such an explanation were
needed (Améry 1995, 131).
Those who have survived trauma understand well the pull of that solution to
their daily Beckettian dilemma, “I can’t go on, I must go on.”20 For on some days
the conclusion “I’ll go on” cannot be reached by faith or reason. How does one
go on with a shattered self, with no guarantee of recovery, believing that one will
always stay tortured and never feel at home in the world? One hopes for a bear-
able future, in spite of all the inductive evidence to the contrary. After all, the
loss of faith in induction following an unpredictable trauma also has a reassuring
side: since inferences from the past can no longer be relied upon to predict the
future, there’s no more reason to think that tomorrow will bring agony than to
think that it won’t. So one makes a wager, in which nothing is certain and the
odds change daily, and sets about “willing to believe” that life, for all its unfath-
omable horror, still holds some undiscovered pleasures.21 And one remakes one-
self by finding meaning in a life of caring and being sustained by others. While
I used to have to will myself out of bed each day, I now wake gladly to feed my
infant son whose birth gives me reason not to have died. He is the embodi-
ment of my life’s new narrative, and I am more autonomous by virtue of being
so intermingled with him. Having him has also enabled me to rebuild my trust
in the world around us. He is so trusting that he stands with outstretched arms,
wobbling, until he falls, stiff-​limbed, forward, backward, certain the universe
326 Memory and Emotion

will catch him. So far, it has, and when I tell myself it always will, the part of me
that he’s become believes it.

Notes

1. Delbo attributes this statement to one of her fellow deportees (Delbo 1995, 267).
2. This chapter was first published in 1997 and reprinted in Aftermath: Violence and
the Remaking of a Self, 37–​66 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). It is
reprinted here with abridgements and slight modifications with the permission of the
author and press.
3. In defending a feminist account of the relational self, I do not mean to imply that all
relational accounts of the self are feminist. Some that are not (necessarily) feminist are
those advocated by G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and contemporary communitarians.
4. This paraphrases Judith Herman’s description of traumatic events (Herman 1992, 33).
This description and the following discussion of trauma are distilled from Herman’s
book as well as from Janoff-​Bulman (1992) and Shay (1994).
5. While some poststructuralists hold that the self is a fiction, not all do, and this is
not, in any case, implied by the view that it is a narrative. I think the clinical studies
and narrative accounts of trauma discussed below show that the self is not a fiction,
if that is taken to mean that it is freely constructed by some narrator. No one, not
even Stephen King, would voluntarily construct a self so tormented by trauma and its
aftermath.
6. For other discussions of the relational self, see Jaggar (1983) and Meyers (1987, 1989,
1992, 1994). Virginia Held gives an excellent survey of feminist views of the relational
self in so far as they bear on moral theory (Held 1993, 57–​64).
7. An exception is Bernard Williams (1970), who presents a thought experiment that
prompts the intuition that in at least some cases of so-​called body transfer, we would
identify with the surviving individual who has our body, and not the one who has our
memory and other psychological characteristics.
8. Two critiques of Beauvoir’s position on maternity and childbirth are presented in
Ruddick (1989, 192–​193, 275 n. 11) and Mackenzie (1996).
9. This quote is from an unpublished manuscript of Margaret Walker’s titled “The
Concept of the Erotic.”
10. See also the discussion of charged memory in Proust in Glover (1988, 142–​145).
11. If memories do not reside solely in the mind or in the body, but rather are a function
of the way in which consciousness “inhabits” a body, then not only Locke’s thought
experiment, but also Sydney Shoemaker’s (1975) and Bernard Williams’s (1970) ap-
pear to be incoherent as described.
12. I thank Alexis Jetter for showing me the work of this author.
13. See Terr (1994) for an account of different responses to one-​time and ongoing
traumas.
14. Parfit, would not, however, agree with the relational account of the self I am
defending here.
 Outliving Oneself 327

15. Of course, not many rape survivors are fortunate enough to have such an experience
with the criminal justice system, given the low rates of reporting, prosecuting, and
conviction of rapists. I also had the advantage of having my assailant tried in a French
court, in which the adversarial system is not practiced, so I was not cross-​examined
by the defense lawyer. In addition, since the facts of the case were not in dispute and
my assailant’s only defense was an (ultimately unsuccessful) insanity plea, no one in
the courtroom questioned my narrative of what had happened.
16. Delbo (1995, 241).
17. This is one of the positive aspects of a kind of multiple consciousness. Cf. Scheman
(1993), Lugones (this volume), Matsuda (1989), and King (1988).
18. When I later mentioned this to my therapist, she replied, reasonably enough, “Why
not shoot the assailant instead?” But for me that thought was not yet thinkable.
19. I should make a distinction here between the ability to kill in self-​defense and the de-
sire to kill as a form of revenge. Although I think it is morally permissible to possess
and to employ the former, acting on the latter is to be morally condemned.
20. See Beckett (1965, 414). What Beckett actually writes is “you must go on, I can’t go
on, I’ll go on,” translating his original ending to L’Innommable: “il faut continuer, je ne
peux pas continuer, je vais continuer.” I am grateful to Thomas Trezise for pointing out
this passage.
21. For a discussion of Pascal’s wager, see Pascal (1958); and for a discussion of “the will to
believe,” see James (1896).

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Jaggar, Alison M. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman &
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 18
Does Neutral Monism Provide the Best
Framework for Relational Memory?
Iva Apostolova

My main goal is to identify the best metaphysical and epistemological frame-

work to accommodate the relational model of memory to which I am sympa-
thetic. The relational account of memory, preferred by many feminists, offers a
way of looking at memory that decisively undermines the traditional archival
model where the rememberer is a disembodied rational agent in a social vacuum
who remembers episodes from her past life with various degrees of accuracy
and where accuracy is the exclusive guarantor of the continuity of her own self.
The relational account, in contrast, offers a paradigm of interpreting autobio-
graphical memory that situates the rememberer within complex social networks,
where individual memories are not only interpreted by others but also altered by
the environment and the emotional states of all the rememberers involved. On
the relational account, the rememberer is not only an autonomous agent, but also
embodied, emotional, rational, and social all at the same time.
The relational account of memory is best equipped to deal with traumatic
memory, which continues to be of significant interest to feminist philosophy.
Traumatic memory, broadly understood, is the memory of an event (or events)
that has a significant negative psychological or social impact on the individual or
the group. Recent literature on trauma has described such negative impacts ran-
ging from partial loss of short-​term, long-​term, or even operational memory, to
recurring spatiotemporal confusion (“patchy memory”), to dramatic individual
or social behavioral changes. Traumatic memory is little more than ignored by
traditional accounts of memory, which operate almost exclusively from a view-
point of one’s past experiences where accuracy of the memory representation
is measured against an alleged original experience. This rather simplified and
overly abstract model of cognition cannot provide us with a nuanced and well-​
thought-​out account of something as complex as trauma, whether individual or
collective. In cases of trauma, the reliability of the rememberer’s cognitive cap-
acities is only one piece of the puzzle. The relational account of memory seems
better suited to account for trauma because it incorporates factors beyond these
capacities. What is more, by undermining the traditional model of memory, the

Iva Apostolova, Does Neutral Monism Provide the Best Framework for Relational Memory? In: Feminist Philosophy
of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0019
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 331

relational view offers not only a re-​evaluation of our knowledge (of the past) but
also a much-​needed overhaul of traditional conceptions of the self.
The relational account of memory, however, is not without problems. One se-
riously stubborn problem is the threat of false memories known as the “semantic
contagion” problem, which is the problem of interpreting one’s past based on a
current shift in one’s circumstances or in the social context. In other words, the
concern is that the reconstructive model of memory threatens to displace the
notion of truth/​veridicality and cause a loss of psychological and cultural control
over one’s past (Sutton 1998, 13). I propose Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism as
the most deserving framework to accommodate the relational view of memory
while successfully addressing concerns of semantic contagion by reframing how
we, as cognitive agents, relate to reality, including to other agents. The neutral
monist account of memory is not incompatible with panpsychism, much pre-
ferred by some feminists for its capacity to avoid dualism in general and mind-​
body dualism in particular, among other benefits. I also argue that working from
a genuine neutral monist vantage point spares us the need to adopt an either-​or
stance in regard to narrativism and episodism. In the current debate, narrativism
gives preference to psychological over bodily continuity of the self, thus implying
an undesirable cognitive dichotomy and hierarchy when viewed with a feminist
lens.1 Episodism, on the other hand, has been associated, in part, with the view
that puts the very existence of a continuous self into question. A continuous,
that is, synchronic and diachronic, self is not a required category as long as there
are individual atomic memories present that measure up to a pre-​established
standard of accuracy. It is this standard of accuracy that guarantees that the sub-
jective experience becomes an objective piece of knowledge.
The revised relational account of memory, which is within the metaphysical
and epistemological framework of neutral monism, then, decisively rejects the
idea of “places” where memories originate or are stored but, in contrast, operates
with networks of relations between “events,” the basic units of reality for the
neutral monist. This adjustment, in turn, eliminates the dichotomy between ex-
perience and knowledge and dispenses with pre-​established standards of accu-
racy; for the neutral monist, experience and knowledge are one and the same.
For example, Sue Campbell draws our attention to the intersection of know-
ledge and experience illustrated by the human rights movement HIJOS (Hijos
por la identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio [Sons and Daughters
for Identity and Justice against Forgetfulness and Silence]), started in the 1990s
in Argentina and Guatemala (Campbell 2003, 373). HIJOS is known for orga-
nizing public demonstrations called “escraches” during which the demonstrators
use different means, such as graffiti spray-​painting, displaying photographs of
the victims, and dancing to remind the public of their “disappeared” relatives.
The government’s ultimate goal is to obliterate from the collective consciousness
332 Memory and Emotion

anything that has to do with forced disappearances by either denying the facts
of disappearance or, in some cases, denying the very existence of the people
captured in the photographs carried around by the demonstrators. The goal of
the protesters is twofold. On the one hand, they take the decisive and, in many
cases, life-​threatening, stance of rememberers. They remember and when they
remember the disappearances are real. On the other hand, they, as rememberers,
aim at changing the reality for all of us, even the ones who are unaware or simply
born after the fact of the disappearance. My own autobiographical memory is
necessarily modified and forever changed by my knowledge of the escraches pre-
cisely because my reality is forever changed. I no longer can ignore the fact that
someone has chosen to remember, even at her/​his/​their own peril. I no longer
can ignore someone else’s trauma. This trauma has become a part of the col-
lective consciousness, and, upon becoming aware of it, I have an obligation to
change how I view the past.

The Relational Account of Memory

The relational account provides a viable alternative to the various models of

memory and personal identity inspired by John Locke’s insight that the self is
continuous only if it accurately remembers and stores an original past experi-
ence. The “psychological continuity” model of memory, as well as the archival
model, are based on this insight. As mentioned earlier, the relational account
of memory has, however, been subject to the semantic contagion objection first
raised by Ian Hacking. Hacking suggests that if we remove accuracy from the
account of episodic memory, we are exposing the rememberer to “chronic sug-
gestibility” where she is constantly reinterpreting her memories, thus leaving her
in a state of confusion about her past. I believe that providing the appropriate
metaphysical and epistemological framework will allow the relational model to
successfully dispel this criticism in a general and categorical way. Linda Martín
Alcoff, for example, proposes a way of dealing with the threat of semantic con-
tagion in the case of sexual abuse memories by emphasizing the epistemological
concept of truth, which she believes Hacking to have sidestepped (Alcoff 2011).
While I agree with Alcoff ’s proposed critique, it is my conviction that Russell’s
neutral monism provides not only an epistemological framework, but also a
metaphysical one that can successfully respond to the threat of semantic conta-
gion and ground broader forms of relational memory.
To better understand the inspiration behind a relational account of memory,
Campbell reminds us that the Anglo-​European philosophical tradition has
historically viewed memory, self, and personhood as intimately and inextri-
cably interwoven (Campbell 1997, 52). Insofar as this is the case, undermining
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 333

someone’s remembering capabilities is also undermining their sense of self-​

respect and their social and moral status as persons. As a basis for her own view,
Campbell takes the folklorist Kathrine Borland’s interpretation of self as a “sense
of self.” The sense of self depends on a “reflective awareness of the self that is
both partially achieved and made evident in the doubled presence of the self in
expressions of memory, intention, and self-​regard” (Campbell 1997, 55). In other
words, my sense of self inevitably depends on, among other things, the fact that
some of my experiences are past experiences or experiences of my past. It needs
to be noted right away, however, that my sense of self is not built independently
of what other people think of me. My personal story is always interwoven with
other personal stories. What is more, as Susan James contends, my experience of
the world is not initially integrated; it requires relations with others to become in-
tegrated and perceived as continuous (James, this volume). Taken from another
angle, my person is determined by factors such as where I live; what culture(s) or
subculture(s) I associate myself with or are dominant where I spend most of my
time; what historical evidence I, personally, or the culture I associate myself with,
accepts as valid and valuable; and so on.
If we interpret “person” as a socially constructed and socially constituted cate-
gory, as I do, a relational notion of personhood seems fitting. Under this interpre-
tation, a person possesses key cognitive abilities such as the ability to act, make
decisions, and form intentions, which, in turn, lead to her/​his/​their ability to take
moral responsibility for actions, a central component of personhood. All of these
abilities are formed in relation to others, and so the other is partially constitutive
of the self. The other, through her actions, helps me evaluate, re-​evaluate, train,
and retrain myself to gain the necessary self-​respect and, through this, respect
for others. The formation of intentions depends to a large extent on the ability to
remember past actions and intentions. Many feminists, Campbell among them,
share Daniel Dennett’s interpretation of a responsible act as dependent upon the
cognitive faculty of memory. Dennett’s interpretation of the role of memory in
constructing personal identity is an emendation of the overly rigid Lockean iden-
tity theory. For Dennett, being responsible for an action requires that I have been
aware of this action in the past. Only then can I say that I intended to act the way
I did, and give a reason for my action (Dennett 1978, 190–​191). Remembering
(understood broadly as recollecting an episode or even remembering that I have
forgotten something), then, is a cognitive ability which, like all other cognitive
abilities, is ongoing and depends upon others to function properly.
Remembering a past experience is not simply about repeating the order of
events to myself; on the contrary, when I recollect something, I am integrating
it into my current experiences. This integration almost always requires the pres-
ence of general knowledge, such as the knowledge that all of us experience the
world from a gendered point of view. Remembering a particularly unpleasant
334 Memory and Emotion

bus ride, I remember that the bus was crowded, which made it uncomfortable.
A part of the discomfort had to do with the mere fact that there were too many
people gathered in a small space, and a moving one at that. But another part of
it had to do with the fact that there were more male, college-​aged passengers
displaying behavioral patterns that I, as a woman, associate with rowdiness and
aggression. Hence, my memory of the event is not classified in my mind as a
“crowded bus ride” but rather as an “unpleasant bus ride due to predominantly
male crowd.” In this sense, as Campbell notes, upholding a sharp division be-
tween autobiographical memory and general knowledge can only obscure the
complexity of autobiographical memory. At the same time, drawing a clean line
between individual and collective memory prevents us from taking into account
oppressive harms such as sexual abuse of women or other marginalized groups.
Understanding the nature of collective memory requires understanding that
it is not simply the sum of memories of all individual members of the group.
Collective memory, as Campbell notes, is above all a shared memory (Campbell
2003, 180). The shared/​social nature of memory is well illustrated in the litera-
ture on testimony, for example. As any epistemologist would agree, an account
of knowledge without an established sense of testimonial authority amounts to
very little (it would include, perhaps, only a handful of a priori categories). As
Lorraine Code points out, “Testimony . . . stands as a constant reminder of how
little of anyone’s knowledge . . . could be acquired independently” (Code 2000,
186). Thus, unique recollections of autobiographical events may have a symbolic
or metaphorical value only, or they may acquire the function of reasons for future
actions by the rememberer herself or any other member of the group (Campbell
2003, 49). A HIJOS member’s personal and traumatic memory may become for
others a symbol of government oppression, or it may motivate someone to be-
come a human rights activist herself. Given all of this, denying me the status of a
rememberer is denying me a key cognitive ability of integrating and interpreting
my own biography, and from here, it is preventing me from forming and acting
from a sense of self-​respect. My sense of self-​respect is not an abstract term or
something that my legal rights will guarantee; it is an ability to move my body
in space, to form views about the world, and to have a sense of past, present, and
future. Furthermore, when confronted with something as complex as the expe-
rience of trauma, losing the status of a rememberer can take a more sinister turn
toward gaining the status of a confabulator.2
The relational account of memory accepts the “reconstructive turn” in
memory championed by Marya Schetchman (Schetchman 1994).3 Schetchman
argues against the psychological continuity theories of Sydney Shoemaker,
Derek Parfit, and John Perry (1994, 3–​7). All psychological continuity theories,
she claims, oversimplify memory by representing it solely as a capacity to retrieve
past events, thus making it into a purely psychological capacity and ignoring
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 335

the element of embodiment, among others, present in memory. Schetchman’s

take on memory is echoed in Catriona Mortimer-​Sandilands’s examination of
memory from the point of view of a patient with Alzheimer’s. She writes, “The
experience of memory is thus always already social, technological, and physical
in that the conditions of the relationship between brain and object cannot help
but be located in a complex range of conditions that offer the subject to the expe-
rience, and the experience to the subject” (Mortimer-​Sandilands 2008, 274). It is
not that a patient with Alzheimer’s, she continues, does not have a functioning
memory and thus, a self. Rather, it is that the memories that are valued under the
current social conditions, namely, the coherent memories that provide us with a
narrative self, are undermined in the patient, while at the same time, “the mem-
ories that are very much present to the person—​the familiarity of what it feels
like to walk, to touch, even to dance—​are read as irrelevant, primitive, part of a
diminished self ” (Mortimer-​Sandilands 2008, 275).
Schetchman’s and Mortimer-​Sandilands’s criticisms aim to show the immense
complexity of the seemingly simple relation of a “memory of ” something. The
constant influx of information that comes through our senses (body) at any
given moment, needs to be processed and organized in order to be useful to its
receiver at all (Schetchman 1994, 11). In this sense, accurate representation of
discretely stored past episodes is hardly a priority.4 Moreover, in looking into
the nature of traumatic memory, we are faced with such phenomena as the loss
of whole patterns of memory as a result of trauma where not only are discrete
episodes altered, but so are one’s future desires and expectations (Brison, this
volume; James, this volume). On the contrary, in rewriting and reconstructing
our pasts, we rearrange the different events and blur the boundaries between
individual experiences to weave a tapestry of personal history. For this reason,
the memories that contribute the most to our self-​conception and help us form
self-​regarding attitudes are the ones that “stick” and not simply the ones that are
stored. The existence of sticky memories also means that our current under-
standing of ourselves influences the way we remember events.
We need not forget, Schetchman urges, that a “memory of ” is also emotionally
charged. The emotional content of a given memory is a part of the significance
memory plays in our personal history. We cannot expect that this significance
could be captured by the close resemblance a given individual memory has to its
originary source as the identity/​archival model of memory proposes. This view
would be too simplistic, not only leaving out such important issues as the role
of detail recollection, emotional charge, and context reconstruction, but also
overlooking aspects of the concepts of accuracy and truth/​veridicality them-
selves. Building on Adam Morton’s work on emotional accuracy and “repisodic”
memory, Campbell warns us that there is more to accuracy than meets the eye.
If we are bound to the idea of accuracy in memory, we need to pay attention
336 Memory and Emotion

not only to the veridical representation of a given past event but also to all the
possibilities for representation that every event carries with it (Campbell 2003,
368).5 Thus, we could, and sometimes even should, choose to re-​remember and
rewitness the past.6

Semantic Contagion

In his 1995 book, Ian Hacking, while claiming to adopt a reconstructionist ac-
count of memory himself, seems intensely concerned with recent narrative ac-
counts of memory. Hacking labels the main problem “semantic contagion”
and defines this as instances where the rememberer is exposed to “chronic
suggestibility” and therefore reinterprets her past in light of new (social) inter-
pretative categories (Hacking 1995, 249, 256). To put the problem of semantic
contagion into the light of recent events, one could argue that the chain of public
accusations of sexual misconduct of several high-​profile Hollywood male celeb-
rities, coupled with an increasingly pervasive climate of political correctness and
heightened awareness of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate sexual
behavior, may “encourage” participants in sexual encounters, once thought of as
consensual and appropriate, to “re-​remember” these encounters as nonconsen-
sual or inappropriate. For Hacking, such phenomena put the relational approach
to memory in jeopardy. Campbell responds to Hacking by offering different
reasons for why an important event could be falsely re-​remembered: (1) either
the event is not as important to one’s life story as it might seem at first glance, or
(2) the event is as important as is claimed, but it is not falsely re-​remembered; it is
simply re-​remembered. An event that is important for one’s biography cannot be
isolated from other important events, including other people’s memories of the
same event (either as witnesses or listeners), and hence, false re-​remembering
would require altering a complicated network of past events that will ultimately
lead to altering one’s sense of reality and identity. Campbell concludes that
Hacking’s theory and the case studies on which it relies are, at the end of the day,
informed by a revised version of the archival theory of memory, which holds that
memory should resemble perception in that it should provide a mirror image of
an isolated past episode; anything else is viewed as conceptually “contaminated.”
As Campbell suggests, framing the memory debates in terms of this revised ver-
sion of archival memory prevents us from exploring newly emerging oppressive
harms (Campbell 2003, 197–​198).
Alcoff, on the other hand, points to “the communal nature of concept forma-
tion” to conclude that outside influence on my memories, such as a changed so-
cial perception of a phenomenon, will not create a significant distortion, that
is, a contagion construed as a ground for confabulation within our personal
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 337

memories (Alcoff 2011, 222). In support of her claim, Alcoff analyzes the case
of Sigmund Freud’s patient Dora and the incident where Dora was accused by
Herr K. and Freud himself of projection and, essentially, confabulation.7 Alcoff
explains that if we are to follow the narrative of the accounts of the incident by all
the parties involved, we notice that veridicality is really more a question of “ne-
gotiation” of one’s “position within various social relations,” among other things,
as opposed to a correspondence to an isolated past event (Alcoff 2011, 216).
While Alcoff is very convincing in her analysis, and Campbell certainly may
have a point that Hacking, despite his claim to the contrary, had tacitly adopted
the good old archival model of memory, it seems to me that both responses are
only partially capable of addressing the criticism that autobiographical memo-
ries are vulnerable to (drastic) changes in the political and social terrain, which
may “taint,” as it were, the veridicality of the memories themselves. If we want a
more radical solution that does not commit us to either the hegemony of psycho-
logical continuity, or the nonexistence of subjectivity/​selfhood, we need to show
decisively that the epistemic value of accuracy of autobiographical memory does
not consist in a simplified relation of correspondence between a recollection and
an originary source. Russell’s neutral monism points us in the right direction.

Russell’s Neutral Monism

Russell claims that memory images, which are the truth-​bearers and the meaning-​
carriers, need to be accompanied by certain types of cognitive feelings such as the
feeling of pastness and the feeling of familiarity to be considered genuine mem-
ories. Russell never went as far as claiming that reality is panphenomenal, that
is, that all of reality is grounded in perceptions and experiences (which, in my
view, he should have), a thesis embraced by most panpsychists. But he did con-
cede that “something can be done in the way of constructing possible physical
worlds which fulfil the equations of physics and yet resemble rather more closely
the world of perception than does the world ordinarily presented in physics”
(Russell 1927a, 271). In support of this intuition, contemporary discussions of
panpsychism have made use of Russell’s neutral monism by pointing to how it
manages (in virtue of claiming that the building blocks of reality are neutral) to
avoid many of the snags panpsychism continues to face.8
Russell’s neutral monist theory is a radical theory that does away with the
dualisms between mind and body, knower and known, experience and re-
ality, the phenomenal and the physical, memory and imagination, and, finally,
memory and sensation. Although Russell himself never used the labels, it is my
view that neutral monism draws a picture of a panpsychist, panexperiential,
panphenomenal, and finally, panrelational reality that not only asserts the
338 Memory and Emotion

dynamic, reconstructive model of memory and does away with the classical
model of personal identity by eliminating the subject of cognition, but also
dethrones the hegemony of archival and scientific discourse in the memory
debates. As such, I am convinced that neutral monism contributes to the
“embodied cognition” thesis, broadly construed.9
Although Russell was familiar with the theory of Ernst Mach and Ralph Perry,
he felt it was William James’s ideas that were closest to his own view of neutral
monism.10 Neutral monism is at the same time a metaphysical and an epistemo-
logical theory aiming at explaining the relation, or, more accurately, bridging the
gap between the physical and the psychological. It holds that mind and matter
are made of the same “neutral stuff,” which is more primitive than either mind
or matter taken separately. In Russell’s words, “the ultimate constituents of the
world do not have the characteristics of either mind or matter as ordinarily un-
derstood: they are not solid persistent objects moving through space, nor are
they fragments of ‘consciousness’ ” (Russell 1921, 124). This primitive neutral
stuff, however, should not be conceived as a third entity that has special proper-
ties to differentiate it from mind and matter alike. Neutral monism is instead like
organizing entities in columns and rows. The same thing can appear in two dif-
ferent ways (for example, horizontally and vertically). Being a part of a column
or row requires that the entity enters into at least two different relations (while,
at the same time, there is no external limit to the number of relations an entity
can enter into). Thus, under neutral monism, the object and the subject of cogni-
tion are different only depending on how the given theoretical framework (say,
psychology or physics) incorporates them within its own goals and conceptual
apparatus. As William James argues, experience/​reality for consciousness has
no “inner duplicity”; there is only “pure experience” within which things and
thoughts are only points of reference for us (James 1904, 480).
Neutral monism promotes structuralism about physics (the idea that physics
explains the world only in abstract, structural terms without engaging with the
intrinsic nature of the basic entities of reality) and it champions monism about
perception, which establishes that all we have access to is perception and every-
thing else is inferred. It also accounts for all elements of reality such as events,
particulars, and so on, in multiple ways depending on what our interest in them
is, and how they are grouped. Thus, Russell’s neutral monism seems to be in-
spired not by positing a new building block of reality, an inscrutable of sorts,
but by the desire to explore the relationship and, eventually, blur the boundaries
between knower and known, psychology and physics. Put otherwise, Russell’s
neutral monist theory has managed to flip the question of the relationship be-
tween reality and perception. Instead of asking how the physical entities (atoms,
electrons, quarks, and other such particles) give rise to perceived color patches, it
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 339

focuses on how the color patches we perceive make up the physical particles that
we infer.11
In virtue of his conception of neutral monism, Russell’s main claim could be
labeled panpsychist (or panexperientialist) since he understands the difference
between humans and inanimate objects as one of degree, not of kind. In Religion
and Science, Russell writes, “Now we can only say that we react to stimuli, and
so do stones, though the stimuli to which they react are fewer. So far, as external
‘perception’ is concerned, the difference between us and a stone is only one of
degree” (Russell 1935, 130–​132). Such panexperientialism suggests that the
only reality to which I have direct access is phenomenal reality. In other words,
physics or any other scientific discourse, for that matter, cannot give me anything
other than an indirect account of reality. And so, when analyzing the veridicality
of autobiographical memory, psychology alone, or any other science, for that
matter, cannot get it right, as it were, and give us the complete picture. The so-​
called scientific picture of memory does little more than compartmentalize the
individual’s cognitive experiences, thus keeping the rememberer stuck in a loop
of looking for a perfect match between a representation and its alleged originary
source.
To go back to Alcoff ’s example with Freud’s patient Dora and her encounter
with Herr K., it is not that, as Alcoff herself remarks, the psychological terms of
projection, repression, avoidance, and transference cannot add anything to the
analysis of Dora’s case. It is rather that the veridicality of her memory, and the re-
liability of Dora’s own account of her social behavior, cannot be left to psychology
to analyze and resolve. This qualification, however, does not and should not be
read as suggesting that veridicality of memory is to be endorsed by the privileged
first-​person position of the experiencing individual self alone. To the contrary,
neutral monism consistently undermines the privileged first-​person, subject-​
driven vantage point of knowledge in favor of an integral experience where
knowledge is a result of multiple crossing experience points. In other words, a
relationalist with neutral monist underpinnings would not suggest that Dora is
the sole authority on the veridicality of her recollection. If it were the case, epi-
stemic solipsism would become an imminent threat. Dora’s own recollection of
the event in question is actually a reconstruction where factors like the behav-
ioral and verbal reaction of the other participating parties during and after the
event, the testimony of any witnesses, and so on, are an integral part of the fabric
of her memory, and, in fact, inform the veridicality of her own reconstruction.
Eliminating epistemic solipsism, however, should not come at the price of losing
the uniqueness of individual memories. Thus, the neutral monistic account of
memory will have to reconcile the uniqueness of autobiographical memories
with the antirepresentational, antidualistic, and panphenomenal take on reality.
340 Memory and Emotion

Neutral Monism and Memory

It is a fact that in the earlier part of his philosophical career, Russell held a tradi-
tional, dualistic view of knowledge where knowledge is a dual relation between
a subject and object of cognition (Russell 1912, 1992). However, it is also a fact
that, even then, Russell was very uncomfortable with the representational view
of memory where memories are the subject’s representations of past sensory
stimuli caused by the object. This rejection of representationalism, however,
came at the expense of introducing a rather counterintuitive view of direct ac-
quaintance with the past that was not a viable solution. Russell’s attempt to ac-
count for all types of memory, including remote memory, implied that in such
cases direct acquaintance with the past can be taken seriously only if interpreted
metaphorically.
In light of this tension, as well as his growing dissatisfaction with the dual-
istic model of cognition, which he deemed metaphysically cumbersome and ep-
istemically inefficient in 1918 in Manuscript Notes, Russell writes: “Imperative
to get rid of ‘Subject.’ /​Involves abandonment of distinction between sense-​data
and sensation. /​Involves different theory of imagination and memory. /​Tends to
make the actual object of memory (e.g.) more remote from the present mental
occurrence than on the old theory” (Russell 1986, 261–​263). Russell follows
through with the “imperative” and pronounces the subject of cognition (the “I”)
a “logical fiction,” an unobservable, purely grammatical category that exists only
for ease of conversation (Russell 1986, 274). Since the subject is a “perfectly gra-
tuitous assumption” and therefore, we must “dispense with the subject as one of
the actual ingredients of the world,” the functions of the subject end up being
assumed by memory, which puts it in the center of philosophical inquiry (Russell
1921, 142).
Dispensing with the cognitive subject, as radical a move as it may be, is one
thing, but actually navigating successfully through a subject-​less terrain is an-
other. On the one hand, the textual evidence shows that Russell was aware that
the subject (the “I”) is not the same as the self and that the self has an important
function, but he failed to articulate this function as social and instead settled on
its being simply a “linguistically convenient” category (Russell 1921, 141). This
evidence, however, does not shed much light on the important distinction that,
for all intents and purposes, could be a part of the solution. On the other hand,
preserving the uniqueness of autobiographical memories appears to be chal-
lenged by the blurred lines between perception and memory, subject and object.
And so, with what was available to him, Russell introduced new terms that he
hoped would help him rebuild the picture of cognition.
Memory, Russell pronounced, is populated by a series of images. But since
these images alone cannot guarantee the veridicality of memory (and its
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 341

distinction from pure imagination), Russell adds two other elements that accom-
pany images of past events, namely, “the feeling of familiarity” and “the feeling
of pastness,” which are referred to as “belief-​feelings.”12 Although this term is
not defined precisely, Russell makes clear that belief-​feeling is not just another
propositional attitude. There has to be something, Russell recognized, that guar-
antees that what I remember is genuine. “The image is not distinguished from
the object existed in the past: the word ‘this’ covers both, and enables us to have
a memory-​belief which does not involve the complicated notion ‘something
like this,’ ” Russell writes in The Analysis of Mind (Russell 1921, 179). In other
words, the belief-​feeling is to replace any formal (rigid) form of (propositional)
justification while, at the same time, avoiding the slippery slope of matching up
representations with alleged objects.13 To illustrate even more precisely how the
new mechanism of memory operates, Russell introduces “akoluthic sensation,” a
term he borrows from Richard Semon (Russell 1921, 175). Akoluthic sensation
is the in-​between sensory stimulus and image; it is the not-​any-​more sensation
and the not-​yet-​image. Akoluthic sensations point in the direction of “mnemic
causation,” which is a unique type of causation that guarantees the causal self-​
evidence, for the lack of a better phrase, of memories (Russell 1921, 157).
Despite my agreement, along with Sven Bernecker, that the label “mnemic”
harms rather than helps Russell’s task in that it appears to posit something myste-
rious and unexplainable in familiar terms, I see the introduction of the new type
of causation based on akoluthic sensation as Russell’s (one might even say “des-
perate”) attempt to solve the problem of false memories without appealing to the
notion of correspondence between something physical and something mental
(Bernecker 2008, 41–​46). Thus, if there is a mechanism that guarantees my
unique access to my past, there should be, ceteris paribus and rebus communibus,
no reason not to believe that what I remember is trustworthy. Pointing to the
mnemic effects of a given behavior shows me that I have done two things: first,
I have already identified the trustworthy/​veridical memory as the end result of
the causal chain of events, and second, I have, undoubtedly, formed expectations
with regard to future behaviors. The formation of expectations is something that
Russell considered an integral part of the mechanism of memory, although he
never really explored its potential in depth (Russell 1921, 165, 185–​186).14
Hence, my experience of the past and my knowledge of the past are one and the
same, and, as such, there is no need to worry about the precarious transition from
experience to knowledge, something that preoccupied classical epistemologists
and philosophers of mind. This conclusion points in the direction of reconstruc-
tion and away from storage: in memory we reconstruct and restructure the past
event and do not just store it. Although Russell did not have the relational model
of memory available to him, no doubt missing out on considering the social
dimensions of knowledge and the self, I believe he anticipated, especially toward
342 Memory and Emotion

the end of his career, some of the tenets of the relational account, which, as noted
earlier, is compatible with the “embodied cognition” thesis, broadly construed.

Neutral Monism and the Relational Model

Although the notions of “embodied cognition” and the “extended mind hy-
pothesis” are relatively recent theses in the philosophy of mind, I believe that
Russell’s neutral monism anticipated them in many ways. If I am right, this
solidifies my claim that neutral monism proposes a more radical way than what
is available to deal with the problem of semantic contagion, or more generally,
the problem of false memories. Technicalities and historical subtleties aside,
Russell’s neutral monist epistemic framework looks at the world as sets of sys-
tems/​structures that are accounted for by means of interconnectedness as op-
posed to rigid vantage points: “When we wish to describe a structure, we have
to do so by means of terms and relations” (Russell 1927a, 276). This commit-
ment necessitates the centrality of memory, which replaces, as it were, the sub-
ject of cognition. In order for this substitution to happen, however, memory
must be reinterpreted and the memory-​based model of personal identity must
be reframed. The following passage from The Analysis of Mind demonstrates
Russell’s commitment to changing the way we think of the first-​person vantage
point once and for all: “It is supposed that thoughts cannot just come and go, but
need a person to think them. . . . But I think the person is not an ingredient in the
single thought: he is rather constituted by relations of the thoughts to each other
and to the body” (Russell 1921, 18).
Each piece of knowledge is to be treated as a system/​structure that depends on
other structures right down to the elemental level of the classical “subject-​object”
relation. In other words, there is no (subjective) “place” that offers special, priv-
ileged access to knowledge by positing special mental relations. Thus, my auto-
biographical memories cannot be accounted for by the representational model
where my current representations correspond to given past original events. I do
not think that Russell would have had any heartache accepting that memory
images are “incomplete contributors in a context-​sensitive system rather than
fixed determinants of output” (Sutton 2006, 282). In The Analysis of Mind,
Russell often speaks of the role of philosophy in helping us account for the “in-
tegral experience” of reality, a continuous cognitive process as opposed to some-
thing given.15 This prompted Russell’s bold, although often ignored, proposition
that a new, all-​encompassing, branch of knowledge, which he called “chrono-​
geography,” should be in charge of the integral experience of reality (Russell
1927b, 228). The implications of this claim are twofold. On the one hand, psy-
chology alone cannot answer questions concerning the mind, including those
 Neutral Monism and Relational Memory 343

concerning memory. On the other hand, both psychology and physics are
branches of chrono-​geography, and not the other way around. There is therefore
nothing to be lost and everything to be gained from adopting a philosophical
attitude where the single privileged vantage point of knowledge of the world is
once and for all eliminated.

Notes

1. For more on the narrativity of the self, see Brison (this volume).
2. For more details on the effects of denying women the status of rememberers, see
Campbell (2003).
3. Schetchman writes, “A central function of our memory is turning the countless
experiences with which we are bombarded into a manageable and comprehensible
life history . . . . This will involve summarizing, condensing, and rewriting the facts
remembered, and . . . such work is therefore pervasive in our autobiographical mem-
ories” (Schetchman 1994, 13).
4. Campbell reminds us that the content or accuracy of individual memories or histor-
ical facts may not add anything to the significance of a given memory. For example, a
given memory may be significant through its place in a given cultural narrative or the
themes and characters that populate that story (Campbell 2003, 51).
5. “Repisodic” as opposed to episodic memory is memory that has been reconstructed
as a faithful memory by taking into account the context of, as well as emotional
responses to, the remembered episode (Campbell 2003, 368).
6. The reconstructive turn in memory facilitates the “extended mind hypothesis”
championed by Clark (1997), Clark and Chalmers (1998), and Sutton (2006), among
others.
7. Alcoff (2011, 214–​216).
8. Issues concerning Russell’s neutral monism and some of the traditional problems
that panpsychism faces, such as the grounding problem, physicalism, and mental
monism, are among the ones discussed in Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa’s collec-
tion (2015). See especially Stubenberg (2015).
9. For a discussion of the embodied cognition thesis, see Shapiro (2010, 2011). The
embodied cognition thesis, in broad strokes, accepts that human cognition (under-
stood as the product of the neurocognitive system) is determined by the boundaries
and evolutionary development of the human body. In this sense, the human body is
perceived as a constraint on and distributor and regulator of cognition.
10. For a detailed discussion of the origin of neutral monism and its three main versions,
see Banks (2014).
11. See Stubenberg (2015, 86).
12. For the “feeling of pastness,” see Russell (1921, 266). For the “feeling of familiarity,” see
Russell (1921, 161–​162). Russell defines “feeling” as follows: “I use the word ‘feeling’
in a popular sense, to cover a sensation or an image or a complex of sensations or
images or both” (Russell 1921, 187).
344 Memory and Emotion

13. As Paulo Faria aptly points out, Russell was clear that the belief associated with the
memory-​image is to remain ambiguous in order to allow us to successfully distin-
guish between a genuine past and an imagined one (Faria 2017, 515).
14. Russell writes, “We might provisionally, though perhaps not quite correctly, de-
fine “memory” as that way of knowing about the past which has no analogue in our
knowledge of the future; such a definition would at least serve to mark the problem
with which we are concerned, though some expectations may deserve to rank with
memory as regards immediacy” (Russell 1921, 165). Later he expands on this sense of
expectation: “We do not, unless we are unusually reflective, think about the presence
or absence of correlations: we merely have different feelings which, intellectualized,
may be represented as expectations of the presence or absence of correlations. A thing
which ‘feels real’ inspires us with hopes or fears, expectations or curiosities, which are
wholly absent when a thing ‘feels imaginary’ ” (Russell 1921, 185–​186).
15. Compare with the embodied cognition thesis that integration of experience is a “syn-
chronic and diachronic achievement, the hard-​won and fragile product of ongoing
cognitive work” (Sutton 2006, 285).

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 19
The Odd Case of a Bird-​Mother
Relational Selfhood and a “Method of Grief ”
Vrinda Dalmiya

Old Stories, New Contexts: Grief and Selfhood

I begin with an ancient tale of death and a broken friendship, a tale involving
emotions of grief, revenge, attempted reconciliation, and ultimately, the rejec-
tion of forgiveness.1 This story is embedded as a minuscule part of the longer
Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, which is about a destructive fratricidal war be-
tween the Pānḍava and the Kaurava clans. After a problematic victory in a bloody
battle, Yudhiṣṭhira—​the eldest Pānḍava—​is groomed to ascend to the throne.
But he is reluctant and has many questions about the possibility and strategies of
ruling well under the circumstances. Our story is one of several narrated to him
as part of his “education” to become a good king. Let me summarize the episode
as follows:

Pūjanī, a mysterious bird-​mother lived in the palace as a friend of King

Brahmadatta. She and the Queen gave birth to sons on the same day and the
two infants resided together in the palace. Every day, Pūjanī flew across the seas
and brought back two special fruit—​one for her baby bird and the other for
the human prince. With this unique nourishment, the prince gradually grew
strong and healthy. One day tragedy struck the royal household: in play, the
prince threw his bird companion to the ground and killed it. Flying home from
her foraging mission, Pūjanī spotted her son lying dead on the ground. Crazed
with grief and rage, Pūjanī gouged out the prince’s eyes with her claws, blinding
him for life.
The episode continues as a long and complex dialogue between Brahmadatta
and Pūjanī. Reassuring her of forgiveness, Brahmadatta asks Pūjanī to continue
living in the palace as before. Pūjanī argues that given what had transpired, it
was in her best interests to leave since neither of them could ever move beyond
the memories of violence and injury that they had caused in each other’s lives.
The narrative concludes with Pūjanī ending her friendship with the king, flying
away from the palace, and, as the text says, “disappearing into the beyond.”2

Vrinda Dalmiya, The Odd Case of a Bird-​Mother In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer
McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0020
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 347

The heart of this tale is in the nuances of the dialogue between Brahmadatta, the
father of a blinded prince, and Pūjanī, the mother of the baby bird killed in play.
But the setting of the exchange is interesting also. Intriguingly, this conversation
between parents overtly negotiating their personal tragedies is deemed signifi-
cant for the would-​be king Yudhiṣṭhira’s concerns about governance. The precise
political message Yudhiṣṭhira learned (or was expected to learn) in the epic is not
something we are concerned with. But since the Mahābhārata was intended to be
retold, reinterpreted, and made relevant for different times, my project explores
other possibilities in its contemporary telling/​hearing. Note that the very name
Pūjanī in Sanskrit means “worthy of being worshiped.” Can the bird-​mother be
exemplary for feminists? Does her grief and its complex entanglement with var-
ious other psychological states bring out the political dimensions of maternal
mourning in the aftermath of violence? And more specifically, what is the nature
of selfhood and subjectivity that follows from Pūjanī’s foregrounding her grief in
the way she does in the episode?
Judith Butler’s essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics” shows how grieving is
permission to construct ourselves as related to those we grieve for, and hence,
is a way of including them in our ethico-​political world (J. Butler 2004). For in-
stance, the Women in Black movement—​a small group of Israeli Jewish women
marching silently with Palestinian women (in black clothing) to protest Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands—​delinks grief from narrow nationalist agendas
and signals a broader global responsiveness by “performing” a politics of
mourning for those designated as Other.3 In the Mahābhārata too, we find an
entire chapter at the end of the battle (the Strī Parva) devoted to the wailing of
women from both sides of the warring factions. This public display of grief amid
dismembered corpses of fallen heroes could well be a narrative attempt to break
down the politically constructed binaries of us/​them, friends/​foes. But Pūjanī’s
grief is different. It is not publicly staged in the above sense and is not even
caused by a willfully motivated injury like an act of war. In fact, Pūjanī positions
herself as a bereaved mother but one who became violent herself and who, as we
shall see in her laments, appears to entrench rather than dissolve the categories of
“human” as against “bird” or “us” against “them.” We explore how her maternal
positioning can illustrate a new ethical order “from within the scene of intimacy”
and gesture toward a self-​construction that is open to men as well as women,
while also supporting the agency of women to be nonmothers if they so desire
(Das 2010, 4).
The fact that maternal selfhood need not necessarily entrench regressive views
of femininity is clear in recent feminist work. For instance, Cynthia Franklin and
Laura Lyons analyze the legal and social responses to the murder of Gwen Araujo
initiated by her mother’s grief and go on to investigate resources in a mother’s loss
that subverts even the heteronormativity associated with motherhood (Franklin
348 Memory and Emotion

and Lyons 2008, 2016).4 More recently, the Mothers of the Movement in the
United States show how Black motherhood can be mobilized against racism and
structural police brutality. The Pūjanī story becomes interesting when framed
by such attempts to depersonalize and politicize maternal response to loss.
The episode situates maternal grief thickly in a complex affective cartography
that includes deeply self-​reflexive ruminations about sources of violence in the
mother’s own self. Mourning, tinged as it is here, by rage, revenge, and rejection
of forgiveness, becomes an opportunity to explore the relational complexity in
maternal subjectivity, the functioning of grief in such self-​constructions, and the
ways in which a grief-​fueled selfhood can relate ethically to others.
My hypothesis is that Pūjanī becomes “worship-​worthy” for feminists by
establishing the self as a “feeling thing” through what can loosely be called
(with a Cartesian nod) a “method of grief ”—​a self that is constituted by volatile
emotions because it is embodied and dependent on others. Some commentators
read the episode we are concerned with here as the classical debate between free
will and determinism, with Pūjanī owning her responsibility in the unfolding of
the tragedy and Brahmadatta pushing for a more fatalistic determinism (Woods
2001). But our questions are: Does Pūjanī’s “going away” from the palace (after
rejecting the king’s forgiveness) exemplify an empowering agency significant for
relational selves? And why is her departure, which after all is rejection of a rela-
tionship, such a natural consequence of her grief?

Two Alternative Accounts of Grief and Selfhood

In the tangle of multiple relations in our story, grief both pulls apart as well as
reinstates the bonds of (different) relational selves. Let us look more closely
at this dialectic of binding and rupturing of relationships initiated by the
emotion.

Grief, Harm, and Retreat from a Relational Nexus

The Pūjanī-​Brahmadatta dialogue is overtly about demarcating “appropriate”

trust from its misplaced, irrational forms. Pūjanī’s refusal of Brahmadatta’s
overtures alerts us to the dangers of hasty trust. According to Annette Baier, trust
is “accepted vulnerability to another’s possible but not expected ill will . . . towards
one” (Baier 1994a, 99). What makes trust risky is not knowing what to expect
from others or “the opaqueness to us of the reasoning and motivation of those we
trust and with whom we cooperate” (Baier 1994b, 15; emphasis added). Thus to
the extent that we cannot know or rely on a person’s “good motivations,” we ought
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 349

not to trust her and craft ourselves “in relation” to them. Pūjanī seems to build on
this insight when rejecting Brahmadatta’s pleas for continued friendship.
Being knowingly injured by someone is a clear indication of their ill will to-
ward us and is enough reason to distance ourselves from them (Mahābhārata
12.139.42). Expecting “goodwill” from such persons is, in Pūjanī’s evocative
words, like “continuing to walk with sores on the soles of our feet” (Mahābhārata
12.139.76). But the step from being harmed to absence of trust is hardly unprob-
lematic not only because sores on the soles of our feet sometimes can and do
heal, but because the king in the story had not harmed Pūjanī at all. In fact, he
had been wronged by her! So Pūjanī’s wariness of Brahmadatta must lie else-
where. The text suggests that victims of wrongdoing (like Brahmadatta) are like
simmering embers ready to burst into flame at any time or like a fire under the
sea that periodically spouts out in volcanic eruptions (Mahābhārata 12.139.44/​
45). Such imagery highlights the emotional instability of those who have been
harmed, which in turn generates opacity about their motives. It is no longer safe
for Pūjanī to associate with Brahmadatta, who is now unpredictable as the father
of a boy vengefully blinded by her.
Interestingly, this argument against trusting people we have harmed is pow-
erfully self-​reflexive: it construes not only the king as untrustworthy, but also
Pūjanī herself. Pūjanī in the text explicitly traces her violent action to the love of
her son. Her first reaction to seeing her dead child is extreme grief—​she “burns
with sorrow” and admits that everything else—​her being buffeted by vengeful
emotions—​follows as a consequence (Mahābhārata 12.139.59). The sense of
unbearable risk here comes not only from the opacity of a grieving Other but
from the opacity of her own motives to herself. Pūjanī is unable to trust herself.
Her heinous act of blinding the prince reveals her own undependability. Since
sustainable trust relationships are grounded not only in our expecting that
the trusted will not harm us, but also in the confidence that we will not harm
them, the argument now is that victimhood destroys the self-​trust necessary for
maintaining relationality. The volatility of grief thus undermines relational self-
hood from points of view of both the aggressor and the aggrieved. As the former,
Pūjanī retreats from the king. But its logic places her in the unenviable position
of retreating from herself with self-​doubts about her competence to maintain a
relational subjectivity with him.

Grief, Love, and Affirmation of the Relational Nexus

An alternative narrative about grief is also possible. Martha Nussbaum has

written evocatively about her grief at her mother’s death. It, she says, “felt like a
nail suddenly driven into my stomach” which was accompanied by a “vague and
350 Memory and Emotion

powerful anger—​at the doctors, for allowing this crisis to occur . . . above all at
myself, for not having been able to stop this event from happening” (Nussbaum
1997, 232–​233). For Nussbaum too, this viscerally experienced anguish slides
into other emotions, which together become the grasp of a value-​laden absence
in her life. Apprehending the fact that someone important to us is no more cannot
take the form of a cool and detached judgment. She rhetorically asks: “Can I as-
sent to the idea that someone tremendously beloved is forever lost to me, and yet
preserve emotional equanimity?” (Nussbaum 1997, 243). Emotional upheaval is
the recognition of loss, reinforcing that a person who is lost matters to one. Grief
in its various manifestations therefore becomes a means of acknowledging the
importance of things for us and consequently, our neediness and our depend-
ence on those whom we “do not fully control” (Nussbaum 1997, 232). In this
way, it is a cognitive route to our relational selfhood rather than an impetus for
its dismantling.
The grieving Pūjanī comes face to face with how much her (now dead) son
mattered. A cross-​temporal coherence of discrete mental events marks the value
of the baby bird in her life: the bird-​mother had previously felt joy when the little
chick was born, was happy when it flourished, sad when it was frustrated, and
her actions were routinely organized around its interests. Grief presupposes this
affective history. It signals for Pūjanī the singularity of her life in terms of someone
valuable to her, and thus in grieving its loss, she comes to accept the relationality
of “being a mother of that baby bird” as self-​defining.
The irony here is that grief (caused by death) brings home the relational iden-
tity of the griever only when one of the relata in the relationship is destroyed by
the loss of the loved one. So it could be objected that grief at best is access to a
past (relational) selfhood in the moment of its unraveling. Butler puts this poign-
antly: “I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’
I without you? . . . [W]‌hat I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vo-
cabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you”
(J. Butler 2004, 22). And this could be why, according to Butler, grief fails to give
or present us a “relational identity.” Rather, as she argues, we lose our relationality
and hence, our very self, when we grieve.
However, I wonder if “what I have lost in you” needs to be parsed as “in losing
you, I have lost my relationship” or even “in losing you, I have come to realize
that I could have had a relationship in you.” It could well mean “in losing you,
I have come to realize the importance (for me) of the relationship with you.” In
other words, I wonder whether deaths always entail termination of a relation
rather than a change in them. As diachronic processes, relationships may con-
tinue in new forms and can even survive the destruction of a relata. “Being the
daughter of Betty Craven” presumably remains a central plank of Nussbaum’s
life even after her mother, Betty Craven, died. Martha continued as the “daughter
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 351

of,” but of the (now) deceased, Betty. At the end of a marriage, for example, we
may (or may not) choose to define ourselves as “ex-​wives.” If we do, we continue
to be constituted by the marriage, but now by a marriage-​as-​past and, hence, a
changed relationship. This is an open-​endedness where our narratives deter-
mine whether the relationship to a lost one ends or is merely transformed by their
passing. In the latter case, mourning for those we have lost is consistent with con-
tinuation of a self-​consciously embraced relational self with the dead.
Accordingly, death of a child need not imply termination of the relation-
ship of motherhood. The 1949 journal of a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner,
Nakayama Momoya, whose son was killed in World War II, brings this out viv-
idly. Momoya charts her descent into a Pūjanī-​like near-​madness due to sorrow,
which is gradually replaced by peacefulness on meeting her Buddhist teacher.
But significantly, her descriptions of enlightenment and calm differ from tradi-
tional Buddhist doctrines of giving up “clinging.” Recall Buddha’s handling of
a mother’s loss of a child in the story of Kisa Gotami. When the bereaved Kisa
Gotami begged the Buddha to bring her son back to life, he sent her in search
of a handful of mustard seeds from a household that had not been visited by
death. Of course, going door to door, Kisa Gotami found no such place. But she
did confront the universality of loss in the process, and this enabled her to re-
configure her personal pain. Understanding that attachment to impermanent
things (like her son) inevitably led to sorrow, Kisa Gotami overcame attach-
ment itself. However, there is no such transcendence in Moyoma’s account of
attaining peace. She specifically mentions her efforts of working with her (dead)
son and speaks “not of transcending or universalizing her love for her son, but as
remaining in his presence forever” (Ohnumo 2012, 203). Here, it is the relational
stance to a particular individual (her son) that transformed into Buddha Mind.
We see this possibility also in non-​Buddhist contexts when ordinary locutions
reference grief as a “commemoration” or “a way of keeping the love alive,” thereby
attesting to a continuation of a relationship with the deceased (Solomon 2007,
74). Thus, Pūjanī need not, and does not, “go missing” in her relational identity
as a mother when her son dies. Her grief signifies recreation of a (maternal) rela-
tional identity, but with the new role of ensuring that her son does not disappear
from the social world in the way that he did from the physical one.

Selfhood through a “Method of Grief ”

The duality in the metaphysical functioning of grief accounts for the oddness of
Pūjanī advocating both an acceptance and rejection of relational identity. Note
that her grief signaled and reinforced her love/​bond with her child, yet it led her
to seriously disassociate from the king, thus making the two relations hitherto
352 Memory and Emotion

central in her life incompatible. Note also that this reiterates the worry that in-
timacy and a caring identity are parochial and unable to generate a politics or
augment relations to distant or nonfamilial others. However, further complex-
ities in the story help us move beyond such objections. Remember that both
Brahmadatta and Pūjanī are grieving parents (of course for different reasons), yet
it is Pūjanī alone who finds trusting the king “as impossible as fixing a shattered
clay pot” (Mahābhārata 12.139.69). Brahmadatta, on the other hand, wants to
retain his friendship and connection to her even after the tragic incidents. Thus
it seems that our protagonists experience the personal tragedies involving their
children differently, thereby constructing very different kinds of grief-​fueled
identities. I attempt to explain this difference through what could be called a
“methodic” function of grief. The suggestion is that Pūjanī’s attitude to her an-
guish, unlike Brahmadatta’s stance to his sorrow, displays a mixture of metaphys-
ical and epistemic elements reminiscent of Descartes’s method of answering the
question “What am I?”
The Cartesian cogito emerged as the indubitable Archimedean anchor in a sea
of universal doubt: the manner of its exposure also established its nature. Since
the very attempt to doubt everything led to the cogito, its certainty lay in its being
a substance with the essential property of doubting/​thinking. The universality
of doubt established the self as a “thinking/​doubting thing”—​with doubting
encompassing the entire range of “thought.” In a parallel fashion, grief is simulta-
neously the epistemic means of registering a selfhood and defines the specific na-
ture of the self that is so established. Pūjanī encountered herself through a brush
with maddening pain and rage-​induced violence—​an encounter that decimated
her self-​trust. Though her emotional volatility made her distrust her competence
in maintaining ethical relations, it simultaneously brought home the certitude
of her maternal identity—​an identity constituted by the relation with her child.
Because of this she was prone to upsurges of emotion that tracked events in its
(the child’s) life. Thus, unruly and unpredictable passions that generated her
self-​mistrust also enabled her to recognize herself as a mother. This amounted
to the certitude of her being a thing hurtable by what happened to her child. Like
the Cartesian doubter, Pūjanī, in confronting her volatility, came to know her-
self as a relational subject and, therefore, as inherently emotional and reactive.
Consequently, the literally self-​presenting state of grief made perspicuous a rela-
tional subject that is a “feeling thing”—​of course, with felt grief standing in for a
range of emotions, including joy and rage.
The consequences of this are interesting. First, a feeling thing is not deter-
mined through a single emotion in “referential isolation.” In a different context,
Agnieszka Jaworska argues for the connection of emotions with selfhood and
shows how it is implausible to grieve for someone without also experiencing
“the joys, fears, hopes, regrets etc. characteristic of caring about the same object”
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 353

(Jaworska 2007, 562). Grief references the continuity and coherence of an agent’s
life by tracking the intentional object of different emotions felt across times.
The connection of various emotions to a common intentional object/​person
establishes a pattern that highlights what is of importance to a subject (which
incidentally, Jaworska calls “caring”). Because of this, grief ends up “speaking for
the agent” and there is no need to move to self-​reflexive second-​order (rational)
endorsements of first-​order desires in order to determine identity.
Second, such a feeling thing is bound to another in a way such that misfortunes
in the other’s life (the limiting case of which is its death) make her susceptible to
emotional upheavals. Pūjanī’s self embraces dispositional grief—​a self with a con-
stitutional openness to sorrow—​even in its violent forms caused by misfortunes
of an Other. This openness to being affected also introduces opacity in self-​
consciousness. Note that some philosophers of mind have long noted the co-
existence of a fundamental anonymity with self-​awareness. Dan Zahavi, for
instance, mentions at least five different ways in which ignorance can be recon-
ciled with self-​givenness (Zahavi 2002). When Pūjanī speaks of past experiences
of harm affecting our current motivations long past our ability to retrieve them
consciously, she references one of the ways Zahavi has in mind. However, the
self-​opacity in question here also has a temporal dimension. Our identities spill
into the future. Given our constitutive tendency to be emotionally affected by
uncertain futures, we become unpredictable, unreliable, and opaque even to our-
selves. Everything that goes into the making of who I am is not known to me now.
Finally, because of the centrality of emotions, maternal bonds (even when
nonbiologically conceived) emerge as essentially embodied connections. Pūjanī,
in knowing herself as a feeling thing, knows herself as a parent-​with-​a-​body. It
is significant that after the death of her child, she who had lived in the palace
quite happily before begins to think of Brahmadatta and his son in terms of their
species-​specific bodied configurations and social locations that are different from
hers. The particular, individualized friendship between Pūjanī and Brahmadatta
now gets embedded in power-​infused hierarchies emanating from the social
categorizations of their respective bodies. The king and the prince are perceived
as members of the Kshatriya group—​a warrior caste known for aggression
(Mahābhārata 12.139.16–​19). They are also “human,” while Pūjanī is a “bird,” the
natural hunting target for “humans” (Mahābhārata 12.139.60). Tensions in their
relational nexus are now naturalized in terms of the prevalent social constructs
and norms associated with these bodily differences. Pūjanī thus becomes very
much a bird-​mother living and interacting dangerously with human actors who
conceive members of her kind as prey or food.
But herein is a problem. Emphasizing the corporeal interrelationality of ma-
ternal identity, once again, questions the plausibility of a continued relationship
with a dead child. In what sense can Moyoma or Pūjanī survive the deaths of
354 Memory and Emotion

their respective children as relational beings when the relationality is corporeal

and the body of one of the relata is made absent by death? In response, I refer
to a fascinating paper by Jane Ribbens McCarthy and Raia Prokhovnik that
distinguishes between the “enfleshed” Other and embodiment to argue for a ma-
terial relationship even with the dead:

With the death of a loved one, the biological body of “you” is buried or cre-
mated, while material presence of “you” is not wholly erased but remains in
significant ways. But also, and crucially, the “us” remains as an embodied
relationality, held with “me” in many embodied forms; the “us” is written into
“my” body, and continues to have material presence after death. (McCarthy and
Prokhovnik 2013, 11; emphasis added)

This hints at how a truly relational perspective leads us to relax the bounded-
ness of material bodies themselves. Construed relationally, the materiality of a
body is not simply that of a biological entity but can survive as corporeal traces—​
including those of grief and emotionality—​left in another body. If bodies also
are “relational” and “open” to other bodies, then death is the cessation of an
“enfleshed” person, but it allows for a continued material connection in and
through these other bodies. I preserve, for example, the purse my mother was
using when she died because it carries her touch. Though deceased, the child has
left its material presence that can be felt through its “traces” in (say) her mother’s
bodily being. Such bodily traces of the deceased are like genetic imprints
working through other bodies across times and sometimes can be stronger than
conscious memory.5 Thus in embracing the dispositions to feel a whole range of
emotions, Pūjanī can, without paradox, endorse an embodied relationality with
her now dead child.
Such self-​construction of a “feeling thing” through what I have been
calling the method of grief stands in stark contrast to Brahmadatta’s percep-
tion of himself. Brahmadatta keeps his emotions (and hence his embodied
entanglement with his son) at arm’s length. When he confronts himself as
bound-​with-​his-​child through his own grief, his response is to retreat to intel-
lectual self-​reflectiveness and philosophical analysis. He rationalizes away the
emotions produced by the bond to his son and quickly shifts to the position of
a cool-​headed “friend,” benefactor, or moral judge, thus vacating the location
of a “parent.” Grief for him is episodic. He retreats from acquiescing to the on-
going affective vulnerabilities that come along with accepting oneself as a thing
that must feel in response to what happens to another. He therefore, need not
mistrust himself as participating in relations of trust because he does not give
up on rational self-​control. Unlike the Cartesian, he never succumbs to the
universality of doubt or self-​mistrust.
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 355

However, Brahmadatta, in shifting focus away from the tragedy of his son and
its emotional effects on him, also rationally explains away Pūjanī’s vengeance. In
this he tries to tame Pūjanī. She becomes someone he has cognitively grasped
and, therefore, someone who can no longer surprise with hurtful behavior. These
moves enable Brahmadatta to shore up his defenses against the perils of depend-
ency that come with friendship and love. Maybe as the ruling power, the myth of
control and invincibility is habitual for him, and he is expected to forge relations
of pragmatic and reason-​based solidarity. The king’s political sovereignty and
moral high ground come to mark a disembodied (though relational) selfhood.
But now we face another quandary. Pūjanī, in recognizing herself through the
“method” of grief, seems to undermine her agentive significance. A self, config-
ured in terms of maternal grief, is inherently untrustworthy (because of being
inherently volatile) and thus is unreliable as an ethico-​political agent. How then
can Pūjanī’s acceptance of her opacity to herself be empowering? Continuing
with the Cartesian parallel is helpful here. After emerging from universal doubt,
Descartes’s “thinking thing” went on to bring back belief in an external world.
This, of course, was done with the help of a God. But note that Cartesian proofs
of God relied on innate ideas within the cogito/​thinking thing. Could Pūjanī’s
acceptance of herself as a feeling thing through her self-​mistrust bring back her
agentive confidence? And could the seeds of such confidence and moral agency
lie within her starting point—​the world of a caring, (dispositionally) grieving
mother open to emotional upheavals?
To answer this, we take a closer look at the vulnerabilities of the corporeal re-
lational self. On the ontological or metaphysical plane, an embodied relational
self is exposed to physical death and violence and routine discursive erasures by
being socially constructed in unpalatable ways (J. Butler 2016). Such selves live
with unpredictable violence inflicted on them and, as we have seen, with unpre-
dictable violences that they themselves initiate on others in response. But note
that physical violence here is coupled with uncertainty and not-​knowing. This
introduces an epistemic vulnerability in the lives of corporeal relational selves.
So now our question is whether such metaphysical and epistemic vulnerabil-
ities could be a resource for unique modes of ethico-​political functioning. Could
Pūjanī’s “disappearing into the beyond” be both an exemplification of and search
for a form of agency that is oddly consistent with being “out of control” and the
“unknowing” inherent in being a feeling thing?

Uncertain Agency

According to our reading the narrative does not end with a bird-​mother’s pa-
ralysis because of self-​doubt. She acts in leaving the king, and her exit from the
356 Memory and Emotion

palace is a resistance to the reason-​based and emotion-​denying identity being

foisted on her. This is a constructive agential move consistent with her vulner-
ability and unknown-​ness to herself. The story’s abrupt end and silence about
where Pūjanī went and whether she lived happily ever after, only deepens the
unknowing surrounding her exit.6
Butler has shown how metaphysical vulnerability or openness to phys-
ical harm lies at the heart of some political actions (J. Butler 2016). Nonviolent
passive resistance, for example, presupposes exposing our bodies to injury, and
thereby vulnerability to police brutality or imprisonment constitutes the dis-
tinct political agency of a peace march or protest. Though Butler also notes that
“by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself it sustains some of its most important
ethical bonds,” the connection between epistemic vulnerability or the opacity of
the self and action is less clear (J. Butler 2001, 22). The attempt to build uncer-
tainty into the heart of political action reworks doubt as a motivator. Vacillating
between options can be experienced as creative and can enable an imaginative
experimentation with oneself. This allows for a receptivity to possibilities that
are usually closed off by certainty. But for such openness to facilitate rather than
stymie action (as in the case of Buridan’s ass), we need to resort to psychological
resources other than certain belief. Being reasonably sure or believing that a par-
ticular option leads to the desired goal can no longer explain action. In fact, the
analysis of action now moves beyond its usual belief-​desire formulations.
In the absence of belief, it is the normative importance of our projects that
compel action.7 The agent is impelled by value (rather than calculations of suc-
cess), and she experiments with imagined scenarios whose implications may
well be still hazy. What if poor women from the South get to set global economic
agendas? What if supporting caring labor is the primary objective of a democ-
racy? Such imaginings of a different world entertain what is not the case and what
might never come to be the case, and yet motivate action. This is the stuff of hope.
Moving toward unknown, not fully known, and maybe even unlikely yet im-
portant futures with hope, lies at the heart of political activity in societies that
are trying to rectify unprecedented forms of oppression and attempting to tran-
scend collective prejudice. When political progress is geared toward producing
the radically “new” and the new is by definition what is yet to be known, it must
involve uncertainty-​fueled action.
In the context of our story, Pūjanī’s acceptance of the epistemically vulner-
able self opens up the possibilities of repositioning herself in truly creative and
new ways. She can leave the palace for an imagined and hoped-​for future—​where
corporeal relational selves will be nurtured and accommodated rather than vio-
lently foreclosed by pregiven scripts, where though she cannot “be” without the
possibility of being volatile, there can be social arrangements to contain the harm
caused by such unreliability. This experimental search takes Pūjanī away not only
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 357

from the palace, but from the narrative world of the epic itself, making it a deeply
self-​reflexive moment where the Mahābhārata self-​critically apprehends its own
limits and gestures (imaginatively and hopefully?) toward a “beyond.” Note that
Brahmadatta’s world, which Pūjanī leaves behind, is also the Mahābhārata’s ge-
neral virtue-​theoretic framework of aiming at individual self-​cultivation through
control of desires and emotion. Surrendering to one’s relationality in a method
of grief signals the limits of such self-​transformation: violence-​proneness caused
by being relationally constituted cannot be “cultivated away.” Rather the search
shifts to newer democratic and institutional structures that allow for anger, rage,
and helplessness while also mitigating the harm they can cause. Pūjanī’s odd
stand on forgiveness begins to make sense in this context.

Selves and the Limits of Forgiveness

The method of grief as discussed so far is an ontological and epistemic move

in the philosophy of mind that enables us to both make and know ourselves
as relational. However, it has consequences for moral psychology—​including
the virtue of forgiveness. Analyzing forgiveness in this Mahābhārata story
is complicated because Pūjanī is both the aggressor (who needs to be for-
given) and a victim (who needs to forgive). The oddness of Pūjanī is that she
champions moral responsibility and unabashedly owns her act of vengeance
but rejects forgiveness, which is a very acceptable “reactive attitude” toward a
wrongdoer. Sidestepping the vast literature on the phenomenology and polit-
ical ramifications of forgiveness, our brief comments focus on the intertwining
of social power with forgiveness. This once again reinforces that a corporeal
feeling thing does not feel in a vacuum but that its emotions are calibrated with
meanings attached to its body. Situating forgiveness within a world of uneven
privilege complicates the virtue in surprising ways. Forgiveness implies that we
“forswear the resentment” of having been harmed and opt not to retaliate even
though we could have (Strawson 1974, 6). Further, we forgive in spite of the
possibility of the forgiven act reoccurring. This is either because we have con-
fidence in being able to protect ourselves if it does happen again, or because we
trust that the act will not be repeated. On the first option, forgiveness indexes
a fearlessness born of power. This is a power that Brahmadatta as a king has.
But then paradoxically, the king’s forgiving Pūjanī only reinforces why she is
(and needs to be) afraid of him in the first place and resists a continued co-
habitation. On the second option—​a trust that Pūjanī’s vengeful act (born out
of love and anger) will not recur—​Brahmadatta adopts a stance not shared by
Pūjanī about herself. After all, the loss of her son made the relationally con-
stituted bird-​mother dispositionally prone to explosive emotions. The king’s
358 Memory and Emotion

forgiveness is now unacceptable because it is based on rejecting who Pūjanī

is—​a “feeling thing” and all that this entails.
Note that the discussion has moved from the person who is forgiving to
what it is like for a person to be forgiven—​more specifically to what it is like
for a corporeal relational self to be forgiven by someone who believes himself to
be a self-​contained and rationally self-​regulating unity. Peter Strawson’s anal-
ysis of reactive attitudes generates a destructive dilemma for our protagonists.
Brahmadatta could adopt the “objective attitude” of thinking Pūjanī to be psy-
chologically deranged or “abnormal” and thereby take her action off the moral
hook. Alternatively, he could treat her as responsible for her actions but re-
tain the “participant attitude” of choosing to truly forgive her vengeance. Both
stances turn out to be unviable for Pūjanī. The rejection of the first is straightfor-
ward enough. It is an objectification that denies Pūjanī’s status as a moral agent
and does nothing to acknowledge or affirm the ethico-​political subjecthood of
a grieving mother. On the second option, Pūjanī’s action is a misstep of an oth-
erwise legitimate moral actor. Brahmadatta could endorse the conclusion that
the motivation displayed in her vengeance “might properly be resented,” yet go
on to “repudiate that attitude for the future (or at least for the immediate fu-
ture)” (Strawson 1974, 6). But herein lies the problem: this stance toward the
bird-​mother drives a wedge between the act being forgiven and the actor—​
Pūjanī’s action is treated as a lapse not truly reflective of herself. But as we have
tried to establish, the dispositional roots of grief and violence (and hence, the
possibility of the reoccurrence of the latter) lie in who Pūjanī relationally is. In
this way, accepting the king’s forgiveness amounts to delinking Pūjanī’s moral
selfhood from her identity as a mother. In reading through the dialogue, it has
always struck me as odd that Pūjanī does not overtly express guilt at what she
has done even though she accepts “responsibility” for it. Lament as a trope is
central in the epic but is strangely absent in this episode. Is forgiveness mean-
ingless because Pūjanī does not experience its correlative emotion of guilt? Of
course, insisting on forgiveness could well be a means of inducing guilt in the
person being forgiven—​an attempt to make her come to realize that what she has
done makes her blameworthy. But Pūjanī from the very beginning fully accepts
herself as responsible for the violence. Could the oddness of her response be an
attempt to contain the harm of violence without necessarily giving up on a self
constituted by this potentiality for violence? Could she be gesturing to a way in
which forgiveness sometimes undermines the agentive selfhood of the person
being forgiven? Could the issue for Pūjanī be not so much about forgiving or
being forgiven, as about (not) forgetting? Pain suffered because of the loss of (or
on behalf of) some others stays with us when these others constitute who we
are—​when they leave traces in our very bodies. Forgiveness, at best, negotiates
past and present violence but is too thin a mechanism for forward-​looking harm
 The Odd Case of a Bird-Mother 359

or open-​ended futures infused with possibilities of harming. Corporeal rela-

tional selves need to contend with such futures. Pūjanī can be seen as leaving
the palace—​and the space of forgiveness—​to “fly into the beyond” in search for
alternatives. She could be staging the delicate balancing act of trying to build
community by holding together both the violence-​proneness and the more pos-
itive relational possibilities of materially and relationally constructed selfhoods.

The Relationality of Care

In conclusion, we draw together these reflections on the bird-​mother of the

Mahābhārata to consolidate the subject position of a mother as a site for nor-
mative transformation. The ethics of care begins from “within the scene of inti-
macy” in the mother-​child relational nexus. But of course, motherhood can be
forced, oppressive, romantic, essentialistic, apolitical, or prepolitical. Shifting
to the grief of a mother as a starting point is more robust. It establishes the re-
lational identity central in care ethics as an intuitively “owned” Archimedean
point, rather than being biologically or sociologically imposed, and then de-​
romanticizes it by recognizing its inherent tendencies toward violence.8 The
relational identity of a bereaved mother as a “feeling thing” has three impor-
tant consequences. First, emotions are indexed to particular contexts and
are inflected by crisscrossing vectors of power that make “being a mother” a
nonessentialized intersectional location. How a mother feels the grief (or joy)
arising from a primal dependency, whether or not she can forgive, what form
her rage, violence, and disappointments take, all depend on her social loca-
tion. Second, emotions are motivational forces. Thus, identities supervenient
on patterns of emotional resonance devolve into plans and policies of acting in
accordance with what and who are important to them. Because of this a caring
maternal identity thus positions itself as a “care claimant” involved in the po-
litical activity of demanding from, and seeking changes in, the normative
and social infrastructural order within which she is a relational self (S. Butler
2012). Finally, volatile emotions make such selfhood epistemically vulnerable
or opaque even to itself. Accordingly, actions stemming from a maternal sub-
jectivity highlight uncertainty and agentive forms that are not only consistent
with but are made possible by the not-​knowing associated with it. Being/​acting
as a mother involves collective sensibilities, and democratic institutions to ac-
commodate them involve structural interventions based on imagination and
hope. Changing norms of grievability is, of course, a way of including the so-
cially excluded and stemming violence against them. But this strategy is effec-
tive because grief stakes out a particular kind of relational identity with those
we grieve for. However, as we see in the case of Pūjanī, this identity is unstable
360 Memory and Emotion

and uncertain of itself. It therefore expresses itself not in certain doxastic states
but through political interventions relying on imagination and hope that can
dare to be transformative of the all too familiar neoliberal order.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Elyse Byrnes, Arindam Chakrabarti, Keya Maitra, and Jen McWeeny
for helpful comments.
2. This is an abridged version of the story as it occurs in the Āpaddharmaparva of the
Mahābhārata (Kinjawadekar 1979, 12.139). Subsequent references to the epic will give
the section (parva), followed by the chapter and then the verse. For a more detailed
textual analysis of the dialogue see Dalmiya (2018).
3. See also Athanasiou (2005).
4. Gwen Araujo, a teenage transgender woman, was murdered on October 4, 2002, in
Newark, California.
5. The editors have pointed me to an interesting paper by Catriona Mortimer-​Sandilands
(2008) that explores how selfhood is maintained through embodied connections with
the environment in spite of memory loss in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
6. I have been influenced by Emily Hudson’s (2013) interpretation of the significance of
silences in the text.
7. See Mollendorf (2006).
8. For a discussion of violence in care, see Simplican (2015).

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Annette Baier, 95–​129. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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 20
Equanimity and the Loving Eye
A Buddhist-​Feminist Account of Loving Attention
Emily McRae

The subject of this chapter is loving attention, a way of paying attention to others
that is motivated by care, respect, and kindness. This way of attending, integral
to Mahayana Buddhist philosophy of mind and ethics, is also central to many
influential feminist conceptions of moral perception. By focusing specifically on
loving attention, I hope to show that attention is rarely neutral, that our ways of
attending have affective and normative valences. We do not simply attend; we
can attend approvingly or disapprovingly, compassionately or cruelly, lovingly
or arrogantly. This implies that failures of attention are not always explained by
the absence of attention, but that we can also fail by attending in the wrong kind
of way.
Drawing on both feminist and Buddhist philosophical traditions, I offer an
account of loving attention that highlights the ways in which these traditions
of theorizing attention can complement and improve each other. By putting
these Buddhist and feminist theories of attention in dialogue, my aim is to
expose blind spots in both theories and possible ways of addressing them.
In particular, I will argue that Buddhist accounts can benefit from feminist
insights into the effects of systems of oppression on the ways we attend or fail
to attend to each other. The interplay between social, political, and economic
power and attention is not adequately addressed in Buddhist accounts of at-
tention. On the other hand, the Buddhist focus on the cultivation of atten-
tion, including loving attention, help address important questions that often
remain unanswered in feminist literature: How can I transform my attention
in a liberatory way? What specific practices and skills are necessary for such a
transformation? I argue that Buddhist moral psychological and epistemolog-
ical skills of equanimity and mindfulness help construct a more compelling
account of the cultivation of loving attention. These skills, especially equa-
nimity, are necessary components for understanding how one could change
from an unloving, arrogant perceiver to someone who can lovingly attend to
others.

Emily McRae, Equanimity and the Loving Eye In: Feminist Philosophy of Mind. Edited by: Keya Maitra and Jennifer
McWeeny, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190867614.003.0021
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 363

Attention and Loving Attention

In Buddhist philosophy of mind, attention (Sanskrit: manasikāra, Tibetan: yid

la byed pa) and the related phenomena of concentration (Sanskrit: samādhi,
Tibetan: ting nge ‘dzin) and mindfulness (Sanskrit: smṛti, Tibetan: dran pa) are
defined in terms of the ability of the mind to take an object and the resulting
qualities of that mind so directed. Attention, or what I will refer to here as “bare
attention,” is simply the mind’s ability to be directed to an object. According to
Abhidharma Buddhist accounts of mind, bare attention is one of five “omni-
present” mental factors since every mental state is directed to an object (Dreyfus
and Thompson 2007; Bodhi 1993, 81). Such bare attention can be fleeting or even
momentary, too quick and trivial for us to notice or appreciate. Of course, the
mind also has the ability to attend to an object over time, the skill of concentra-
tion. Another related skill is the mind’s ability to “pay attention” (as opposed to
simply “attend”): the capacity to remember that we are attending to something
and to not become distracted. This is the skill of mindfulness. Neither concen-
tration nor mindfulness is present in every moment of mental cognition, but is
instead a skill that is cultivated, especially in the context of meditation (Dreyfus
and Thompson 2007).
Western approaches to attention, at least folk psychological ones, tend to em-
phasize its function of bringing into focus one object out of many possible objects
of awareness, to foreground an object and thereby relegate other possible objects
to the background or periphery of one’s awareness. William James famously
claimed that attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid
form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of
thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence” (James
1981, 403–​404). Sebastian Watzl summarizes this “intuitive” (which he contrasts
with “scientific”) view of attention: “attention is the selective or contrastive as-
pect of the mind: when you are attending to something you are contrasting what
you pick out with what remains in the background” (Watzl 2011, 843).
The kind of attention I will be concerned with here—​loving attention—​assumes
both the “bare attention” (Tibetan: yid la byed pa) of the Buddhist tradition and
focalization of consciousness that we see in James’s and other Western accounts.
At the very least, it is the mind’s ability to direct to an object, which structures one’s
consciousness by highlighting the object in some sense while pushing other objects
of awareness into the background. Our mind can be directed to an object, or fore-
ground an object, in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, some moral
and some not. I do not share Iris Murdoch’s sense that attention itself is just or
moral: we can attend cruelly or uncharitably by seeing only mistakes or faults, and
we can attend for cruel purposes, such as to more effectively manipulate someone.
364 Memory and Emotion

Loving attention structures our consciousness by bringing positive, compas-

sionate, and sympathetic views of others to the foreground and allowing un-
charitable, unsympathetic, or self-​centered habits of perception to recede to the
background. It includes both the selection of an object and the sympathetic or
loving interpretation of that object. This is because failing to attend lovingly not
only is due to focusing solely on negative objects but also can be due to attending
negatively to an otherwise positive object. It is possible (and not uncommon!)
to maintain uncharitable interpretations even of another’s good qualities: using
a resentful interpretative framework, for example, generosity becomes showing
off, honesty is heard as rudeness, helpfulness comes off as obsequiousness,
and so on.
Loving attention is related but not equivalent to the more widely discussed
concept of “loving perception” or “moral perception,” more generally. Margaret
Holland distinguishes moral perception—​the construal of a situation as moral
and the recognition of morally salient features of that situation—​from moral
attention (Holland 1998, 301). Following Murdoch and Simone Weil, Holland
defines moral attention as a normative concept, an “inner moral activity” that
includes both “an effort to set aside dispositions that tend to distort perception
and an effort to see what is independent from oneself ” (Holland 1998, 306, 309).
Moral attention, she argues, is the ability to change our moral perception for the
better. This is true, I think, of loving attention. It not only is perceiving someone
lovingly, but also implies some degree of inner work: one must select objects
of attention, construe or interpret those objects in a loving way, and, Buddhist
ethicists would argue, habituate oneself to these activities through cultivation
practices. Because I focus on cultivation and transformation, “loving attention”
suits my philosophical purposes better than “loving perception.” Nevertheless,
since the concepts overlap and often used interchangeably, I will draw on femi-
nist and Buddhist discussions of loving perception to develop my account.

Loving Gazes, Arrogant Gazes

That the basic ways we attend to others—​the ways we perceive and interpret
other people, what we notice and what we don’t (or refuse to) notice—​is not mor-
ally neutral is one of the simplest but profound insights from feminist and crit-
ical race theory.1 In these literatures, modes of attention are often discussed in
terms of visual metaphors (the “gaze” or the “eye”) that are used to explain broad
patterns of interpretation (often immediate and reactive) in the context of sys-
tems of oppression. For many feminist theorists as well as antiracist theorists, the
fact that the gaze is morally loaded demands that we develop a broader under-
standing of perception and attention in ethics; we need to understand the moral
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 365

contours of how we see each other (perception) and the inner activity of chan-
ging how we see each other (attention).
Marilyn Frye distinguishes what she calls the arrogant eye—​the paradig-
matic perception of women by men in a phallocentric patriarchal society—​from
a more transformative and affirming way of seeing others, which she calls the
loving eye. Men with arrogant eyes “organize everything seen with reference to
themselves and their own interests” (Frye 1983, 67). For such a person, every-
thing, including other people, is “either ‘for me’ or ‘against me’ ” (Frye 1983, 67).
This reduces others either to tools for meeting one’s desires or obstacles to the
satisfaction of one’s desires. This reduction is accomplished in the act of percep-
tion, through the “gaze” itself (Mulvaney 1975; Yancy 2008; Fourlas 2015).
The problems with the arrogant eye are both epistemic and ethical: such a
self-​centered mode of perception not only falsifies the object of perception (the
epistemic problem), but also “coerces the objects of his [the perceiver’s] percep-
tion into satisfying the conditions his perception imposes” (the ethical problem)
(Frye 1983, 67). When we are gazed at arrogantly, this creates significant pres-
sure to conform to the (inaccurate) assumptions that are motivating and con-
veyed through the gaze. Consider, for example, George Yancy’s example of the
hostile, racist gaze of a white woman toward him, an African American man, in
an elevator. Although her gaze, through which Yancy was perceived as a threat, a
hypersexual predator and criminal, did not upend his sense of self, it did impose
restrictions on his behavior: “It is through her gaze that I become hypervigilant
of my own embodied spatiality. . . . My movements become and remain stilted.
I dare not move suddenly. . . . I feel trapped” (Yancy 2008, 14–​15). Even when we
do not accept the narrative that the gaze implies, we are not free of its coercive
effects.
According to Frye, arrogant perception refuses to see the other as a distinct
individual, existing in her own right, with her own desires, needs, and goals. The
loving gaze requires us to recognize the distinctness of the other without grafting
her identity onto ours (Frye 1983, 75). María Lugones argues that, while Frye’s
account captures some kinds of arrogant perception, it cannot easily explain the
arrogance of white women’s gaze toward women of color: “[White women] ig-
nore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone,
interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst. . . . Many times white
women want us out of their field of vision” (Lugones, this volume, 109). This
failure of love is not well described by the failure of seeing the other as inde-
pendent; rather, it is a failure that comes from an overemphasizing difference
and distinctness, which results in a profound failure of empathy and identifica-
tion. Love, according to Lugones, requires a desire for mutual understanding,
an empathic learning from others that is based on a deep recognition of our in-
terdependence (Lugones, this volume, 109–​110). The loving gaze, then, must
366 Memory and Emotion

recognize the independence of the other, the fact that she is not reducible to our
projections onto her that are based on our own desires and needs. It must also
recognize the interdependence of the other, that fact that she is not different in
kind, that there are realities that we share or could come to share with each other.

Buddhist Accounts of Loving Gazes

The idea that there is, as Yancy has put it, an “ethics of perception,” would not be
controversial for many Indo-​Tibetan Buddhist philosophers, who tend to place
importance on the moral and epistemic qualities of the gaze (Yancy 2014). The
eighth-​century Indian master Śāntideva’s advice —​“Whenever catching sight of
others, look on them with an open, loving heart”—​is not just a practical tip for
the aspiring bodhisattva, but exposes something deeper about the moral and ep-
istemic significance of the loving gaze. The nineteenth-​century Tibetan master
Patrul Rinpoche comments on this verse:

Even when you simply look at someone else, let that look be smiling and
pleasant rather than an aggressive glare or some expression of anger. There
are stories about this, like the one about the powerful ruler who glared at eve-
ryone with a very wrathful look. It is said that he was reborn as a preta living
on left-​overs under the stove of a house, and after that, because he had also
looked at a holy being in that way, he was reborn in hell. (Patrul Rinpoche
1994, 199)

I interpret these stories of the preta and the hell-​being not only as cautionary
tales; they are also expressions of the ethical and epistemic importance of the
loving and compassionate gaze and the dangers of arrogant and resentful ones.
In general, love is defined in Buddhist contexts as the earnest desire for the
happiness and causes of happiness of another being (Path of Purification IX.91,
93, 98; Patrul Rinpoche 1994, 198–​201; McRae 2017b). The relevant sense of
happiness here is a robust one, including not only another’s feeling happy, but
also their overall well-​being, and presence of the conditions and causes for their
happiness and well-​being in the future. Although this definition captures the
intuitive heart of love in Buddhist traditions, it is important to remember that
love in this context is not a mere desire. It is a committed orientation toward the
well-​being and happiness of another that includes cognitive, affective, and cona-
tive aspects. In Patrul Rinpoche’s account of love, he argues that love requires
activities of the mind (thinking about others in the right kinds of ways), speech
(talking about and to others in the right kinds of ways), and body (seeing others
and behaving toward them in the right kinds of ways).2
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 367

I have argued elsewhere for the primacy of moral perception and attention
in Buddhist moral psychology, and so will not rehearse those arguments here
(McRae 2017b). I will only emphasize that, in the context of Indo-​Tibetan
Buddhism, love is transformative: changing the way we see others is a central
component of learning to love them. Love requires seeing positive qualities
of others, or at least not refusing to see them, and the committed attention to
their well-​being (Heim 2014). The fifth-​century Buddhist scholar Buddhaghosa
focuses specifically on how love changes the way we see others; one of love’s
main functions is to “see virtues” in others (Path of Purification IX.98). We do
not make up virtues to project into them, but rather remain open to seeing the
ones that are there. Buddhaghosa notes that if we fail to find a single positive
quality of another, we can cultivate compassion for them by attending to the ways
they must suffer from their complete lack of good qualities (Path of Purification
IX.20)! Many Tibetan Buddhist contemplative practices that are designed to cul-
tivate love focus on changing the way we habitually perceive others, training us,
for example, to imagine others as our children or parents.3 The function of these
contemplative practices, as I see it, is to change our deeper habits of attention by
introducing new frames, such as “child” or “parent,” to apply to others and, in so
doing, intervene in habits of apathy and arrogance that usually characterize the
ways we attend to others.
Drawing on both Buddhist view of loving attention and feminist ones, I offer,
and aim to defend in the remainder of the chapter, the following as an account
of loving attention: loving attention is the direction of awareness toward an-
other person (or sentient being) that structures one’s consciousness in a way that
recognizes the positive qualities of others and makes possible sympathetic inter-
pretations of the other. It allows one to appreciate the interdependence of self and
other without reducing the other to the self (or vice versa). Loving attention ulti-
mately clarifies an otherwise warped and damaging view of the other (as instru-
ment to my happiness, as irrelevant to me, and so on). It is transformative, both
epistemically and ethically: we become better knowers and better moral agents
by attending lovingly. As such, it is an epistemic and moral skill that we can and
should cultivate.

The Accuracy of Loving Attention in the Context

of Oppression: Feminist Contributions to Buddhist Theory

There is, among some proponents of loving attention, such as Murdoch, a sense
that loving attention is more accurate and just than modes of attention that are
arrogant or self-​centered (Murdoch 1970, 33).4 In her analysis of Murdoch,
Holland distinguishes the qualification of “accurate” from “just”: the accuracy of
368 Memory and Emotion

attention is seeing “something as it actually is,” whereas the justice of attention is

“seeing fairly” by considering “the relevant background and other factors which
contribute to developing an overall understanding” (Holland 1998, 309). In my
own account, I credit loving attention with clarifying (rather than distorting)
perception, which includes both accuracy and justice, in Murdoch’s sense.
But the clarifying potential of loving attention is far from obvious. In
Murdoch’s famous example of a mother-​in-​law who actively changes her per-
ception of her (lower class) daughter-​in-​law from “sometimes positively rude,
always tiresomely juvenile” to “refreshingly gay,” “spontaneous,” and “delight-
fully youthful,” she claims that this new, loving way to attend is ultimately more
just (Murdoch 1970, 16–​18). But why? Maybe the daughter-​in-​law really is a
tiresome person and this redescription of her as refreshing and gay is not only
less accurate, but a self-​deceptive, delusional coping mechanism that allows the
mother-​in-​law to construct a (false) narrative about her family life that she can
live with.5 Because of its inaccuracy, such a redescription could be dangerous
if, for example, it blinds the mother-​in-​law to the real ethical misconduct of the
daughter-​in-​law.
Of course, the mother-​in-​law in this example recognizes her own tendencies
toward snobbery and her jealous desire for her son’s attention, and, in changing
her perception of her daughter-​in-​law, she is attempting to correct those biases
(Murdoch 1970, 17). So, we could argue that accuracy is explained less by the
narrative it projects onto others (“refreshingly gay”), than by the biases it corrects
in the self (snobbery and jealousy). As Murdoch puts it, loving attention is “the
effort to counteract such states of illusion” (Murdoch 1970, 36).6 This is also what
many Buddhist moral psychologists and ethicists would say. According to the
Ornament of the Mahāyāna Scriptures, love dissolves the “mind-​made knot”
of dysfunctional mental states (17.19). It is because it can reduce biases caused
by dysfunctional mental states such as hatred, anger, envy, and arrogance, that
loving attention clarifies, rather than obscures or distorts, our perception of
others.
This response makes sense of many cases of loving attention, including
Murdoch’s mother-​in-​law case, since built into that case was the assumption
of real anti-​daughter-​in-​law bias in the mother-​in-​law’s habits of thinking and
feeling (Murdoch 1970, 18). But the bias in this case is based on the overvaluing
of the self and the tendency to find only fault with the other. If this is our ten-
dency, then loving attention would help clarify our perception of the other, since
it would, as Buddhist ethicists say, provide an antidote to that particular kind of
misperception. But what if our problem is not overvaluing the self and finding
fault with others but, rather, undervaluing the self and excusing others’ bad be-
havior? As Sandra Bartky has argued, when we are accustomed to identifying
with the beloved’s narratives and providing him with the emotional support
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 369

that maintain them, we make ourselves vulnerable to epistemic and moral bias
(Bartky 1990). We can learn to accept “the world according to him” (what Bartky
calls an “epistemic lean”). If the “world according to him” contains significant
immorality, then over time one may be unable to determine when the beloved’s
actions are more seriously immoral (what Bartky calls an “ethical lean”) (Bartky
1990, 111–​113). Could loving attention dissolve the mind-​made knot of these
afflictions? This is complicated by the fact that undervaluing the self and pre-
emptively forgiving others’ bad behavior can sound virtuous (especially in the
context of Buddhist ethics), which obscures their epistemic and ethical dangers.
We could say that the “undervaluing the self ” cases are not different in kind
from the “overvaluing the self ” cases, since the obsession with the self is at the
root of both. As Maria Heim has argued, self-​loathing, on at least some Buddhist
views, is understood as a problem of self-​centeredness (Heim 2009). Whether
one is self-​aggrandizing or self-​loathing, there is still an inflated concern with the
self, a way of understanding others that is refracted through the lens of one’s own,
self-​absorbed narrative. The content of self-​absorbed narratives may vary—​from
arrogant narratives of being better than others to self-​deprecating or despondent
narratives of being worse than others—​but they are all, in the end, narratives
centered on the self.
But there is another resource in Buddhist and feminist, especially Womanist,
philosophy to respond to the danger that loving attention may further distort
perception and judgment in the context of oppression: self-​directed loving atten-
tion. Alice Walker famously claimed that a Womanist “Loves herself. Regardless”
(Walker 1983, xi).7 Self-​directed loving attention is about seeing ourselves chari-
tably and fairly, being committed to our own lasting happiness and the causes of
that happiness, and seeing how we are dependent on others—​and them on us—​
but not reducible to others. This imperative—​to love oneself, regardless—​is not as
antithetical to the Buddhist ideal of universal care as it may seem. Buddhaghosa
argues that, in order to effectively love others, we must direct loving attention
to oneself: “May I keep myself free from enmity, affliction and anxiety and live
happily” (Path of Purification IX.8). He considers the objection that this self-​
love might “conflict what is said in the texts” insofar as self-​directed love may
seem selfish, but ultimately rejects the objection. This initial, self-​directed love
functions as an example, he argues, that makes the other-​directed loving atten-
tion possible. By making oneself an example, we become more sensitive to others’
similar desires for happiness (Path of Purification IX.10).8 In Mahayana Buddhist
ethics, self-​directed love can be more directly justified as it is part of one’s larger
moral commitment to care, since the call to attend lovingly to all sentient beings
who suffer also applies to oneself.
Although self-​ directed loving attention is not incompatible with the
broader Buddhist ethical projects, Buddhist ethical prescriptions about loving
370 Memory and Emotion

attention need more nuance if we want to apply them to the context of oppres-
sion. A practice of self-​directed loving attention may be fruitful (and life-​saving)
for a member of an oppressed group who is at risk of undervaluing herself and
excusing the bad behavior of others. A practice of other-​directed loving attention
may be central for a member of an oppressor group who is a risk of arrogant per-
ception. Of course, many of us belong to both oppressed and oppressor groups,
as in the case of white women who are often both the victims and perpetrators of
arrogant perception. This suggests a need for even more sophistication in how we
think about and practice loving attention, since in such cases one may need to al-
ternate between a focus on self-​directed loving in some situations and a focus on
other-​directed loving attention in others. This is one area in which feminist and
critical race moral psychology can supplement Buddhist conceptions of loving
attention by exposing the ways they fail to fully account of the role of power and
domination in understanding loving attention.

The Cultivation of Loving Attention: Buddhist

Contributions to Feminist Theory

Loving attention, on this Buddhist-​feminist account, is transformative: it

changes how we see, how we understand others and ourselves, how we in-
terpret events, and how we respond to those events. But how do we effect
that transformation? What mechanisms, skills, or practices make the tran-
sition from arrogant perception to loving attention possible? There is not,
in Western philosophical (including feminist) literature, much emphasis
on the cultivation of loving attention. Murdoch, in her mother-​in-​law ex-
ample, drops some clues about how such a change may occur —​for example,
by locating one’s own biases and intentionally creating new narratives that
counteract these biases—​but the mother-​in-​law seems to be able to change
her perception of her daughter-​in-​law by a simple act of the will, upending
her habitual modes of perception in one decisive mental act.9 Although this
could happen, it seems unrealistic to expect that all arrogant perception, es-
pecially perception that is based in and reinforced by systems of oppression,
could be so easily transformed.
Lugones offers one possible practice of loving attention: world-​traveling,
immersing oneself into another’s “world” in order to better understand the other
and oneself. Traveling to another’s world, and (re)understanding both the other
and the self through that travel, requires playfulness and an openness to dis-
covery (Lugones, this volume). It is unclear whether world-​traveling is a practice
that cultivates loving attention or a practice that is made possible by loving at-
tention (or both). Either way, the question of cultivation is relocated rather than
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 371

resolved, since we still ask, how do we learn to world-​travel? How do we become

motivated to world-​travel?
The basic issue here extends beyond Lugones’s account of world-​traveling. It is
about the skills that are required to make us receptive to others in a non-​self-​cen-
tered way. To advise an arrogant perceiver that she must learn from others is not
likely to be effective since part of what it means to arrogantly perceive others just
is to assume that we know all there is to know about them, that our projection
onto them fully captures who they are. It is necessary to think, then, about how it
is we are able to learn from others and how the assumptions of arrogant percep-
tion are undermined.
Cultivating loving attention requires a shift in one or more of the following: (1)
what we pay attention to; (2) how we pay attention; (3) the purpose of our at-
tention; and (4) the fact of attention, that is, that we are paying attention at all.
Loving attention requires us to pay attention to admirable qualities of others and
sympathetic interpretations of their situation with an eye toward their continued
happiness, or as Buddhist ethicists would say, we need to attend to the happiness
of others and the causes of that happiness. But it is not only the content of the at-
tention that matters for loving attention, the quality of the attention matters, too.
Two qualities in particular stand out: that the attention is reasonably sustained
(not fleeting) so that it can inform our related habits of thinking, feeling, and ac-
tion, and that the attention has an affective component as loving attention. Third,
the purpose of and motivation for loving attention is not self-​centered. This is the
quality of loving attention that both Frye and Lugones focus on: loving attention
does not reduce others to the self, nor does it construct others as fundamentally
different in kind from the self. Finally, loving attention demands that we pay at-
tention in the first place, that is, it counteracts indifference, apathy, and problem-
atic habits of ignoring.

Equanimity, Mindfulness, and the Cultivation

of Loving Attention

Buddhist ethics tend to prioritize the cultivation problem and develop sophis-
ticated theories of moral psychology to address it. Changing one’s mode of
attending in the four ways outlined above requires the development and prac-
tice of certain supplementary skills. Each of these skills militates against partic-
ular obstacles to cultivating loving attention. The main obstacle to the first of
the four ways of shifting our habits of attention—​changing what we pay atten-
tion to—​is negative emotionality, such as jealousy, envy, hatred, or resentment,
that habituates us to focus on negative qualities in others. Obstacles to the other
three aspects of changing our attention are apathy or indifference (obstacles to 2
372 Memory and Emotion

and 4), distraction or not paying attention (obstacle to 2), and self-​centeredness
(obstacles to all, but especially 3). In Buddhist ethical traditions, these obstacles
to the development of loving attention have clear antidotes, the most relevant of
which, for our purposes, are equanimity and mindfulness. Both are themselves
cultivatable, and Buddhist ethicists generally offer many techniques to develop
these skills.10
In Indo-​Tibetan Buddhist ethics, equanimity (Pāli: upekka, Tibetan: btang
snyoms) is defined as freedom from craving and aversion, particularly about
others.11 Equanimity is potent since it can effectively respond to negative emo-
tionality, self-​centeredness, and indifference, that is, it can be understood as an
antidote to most of the obstacles to loving attention. Mindfulness is the skill of
the intentional placement of attention and the vigilance required to maintain
that attention (Garfield 2012, 1–​2). The moral and epistemic power of equa-
nimity and mindfulness to respond to the obstacles to loving attention is not
immediately obvious, so I will discuss each obstacle in turn.
In Indo-​Tibetan Buddhist moral psychology, craving (the affective attitude of
wanting) and aversion (the affective attitude of not wanting and not tolerating)
form the basis of what we would call negative affective states (what Buddhists
call “affliction”), such as hatred, resentment, pride, envy, and jealousy. For ex-
ample, envy is characterized by aversion to another’s success and craving that
success for oneself; jealousy by craving the ownership of another person and the
aversion to being “denied” that ownership; and resentment by aversion to an-
other on the basis of a real or imagined wrongdoing or fault and the craving for
their unhappiness. Since habits of craving and aversion are foundational to the
development of negative emotionality, as freedom from craving and aversion,
equanimity functions as an antidote to various kinds of negative emotionality
that could preclude or inhibit more virtuous emotionality. When we have some
mental space from our craving and aversion reactions, then, even when negative
affective states arise, we are less likely to act on them or have them color our in-
terpretation of others.
By undermining the power of negative affective states, equanimity creates
cracks in the armor of arrogant perception. Arrogant perception—​the sense
that the other is not worth knowing (if only because we assume we already know
everything about her)—​is itself expressive of an afflictive affective state, arro-
gance. It is also conditioned and maintained by other negative affective states,
such as (possibly unconscious) fear of the other, deep insecurity about oneself,
and anger toward and resentment of the other when she acts in unexpected or
“unacceptable” ways, as determined by the arrogant perceiver. Arrogant percep-
tion, then, includes various kinds of negative emotionality. Equanimity practices
are designed to undermine the power of these states by creating a nonreactive
mental space where we develop the freedom to refrain from identifying with the
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 373

craving and aversion associated with such states. By not identifying with feelings
of superiority or fear of others, for example, we are able to pursue other methods
for relating to others, including loving attention.12
Equanimity is also an antidote to self-​centered modes of attention, particu-
larly self-​centered projections of others, because it is freedom from craving and
aversion, which are expressions of, and mechanisms for the maintenance of, self-​
clinging. Craving, on the Buddhist view, is fundamentally about the self (what
I want, what I think I need or deserve), as is aversion (what I do not like, cannot
stand, or cannot tolerate) (McRae 2013). The self-​centeredness of craving and
aversion explains why craving and the related quality of attachment are not con-
sidered to be love, or partially constitutive of love, on the Buddhist view: craving
and attachment are fundamentally self-​centered because they understand the
other person (the object of craving and attachment) in terms of the self (that
is, in terms of what I need or want, how I see myself, and so on.). Love is dif-
ferent because it attempts to understand another person in a way that is not fil-
tered through one’s own desires (McRae 2017a, 507).13 This insight is shared by
Frye and Lugones, who insist, in different ways, that the loving gaze is one that
transcends self-​centered projections or imaginings of the other. Equanimity
helps explain how that transcendence of the self-​centered perspective could
happen: by developing some freedom from our most basic narratives of self-​
centeredness (“I want!” “I don’t want!”) we become more receptive to others’
needs and aims simply because we are not always chasing after our own.
Even if we accept the liberatory potential of equanimity for overcoming nega-
tive emotionality and self-​centered distortions of others, it may not be clear how
equanimity could help overcome the obstacle of indifference. Insofar as equa-
nimity decreases or eliminates craving and aversion, it would seem to make us
less invested in others and therefore more likely to ignore them (McRae 2017a,
495–​497). This is a particular problem for the cultivation of loving attention,
since one of the obstacles to such attention—​and one of the characteristics of
arrogant perception—​is ignoring the other, the complete failure to notice her.
Even if equanimity could help with the previous two obstacles to the cultivation
of loving attention, if it has the side effect of increasing our indifference to others,
then it may undermine the development of loving attention.
That equanimity could undermine or inhibit love is a danger that Buddhist
ethicists anticipated. For Buddhaghosa, indifference and apathy (“ignoring
faults and virtues”) is the near enemy of equanimity (Path of Purification
IX.101). Patrul Rinpoche warns of mistaking what he calls “mindless imparti-
ality” (“just think[ing] of everyone . . . as the same”) for real equanimity (Patrul
Rinpoche 1994, 198). Indifference and mindless impartiality can be avoided
if we remember that equanimity is not about others; it is about freedom from
our own feelings about and reactions to other, understood through the moral
374 Memory and Emotion

psychological concepts of craving and aversion. Suppose that, when having

a conversation with someone, I think to myself, “Wow. This guy is really an-
noying.” I may even start to feel some associated physical sensations, such as
antsy-​ness, fidgeting, or feelings of heat. Applying equanimity to this situation
would be to dissociate from the judgment that this guy is an annoying person,
that annoyingness is some essential quality of him or this conversation. It would
also be to not take so seriously my own cravings (“I got to get out of this conver-
sation!”) and aversions (“I can’t stand this person!”). This mental freedom does
not make me indifferent to him; on the contrary, it makes me more likely to be
able to engage with him in a genuine and caring way. As I see it, one of the subtler
(and superficially paradoxical) insights of Buddhist accounts of equanimity as a
moral skill is that sometimes we have to care less in order to care more.
The final obstacle to loving attention is the fact that sometimes we simply are
not paying attention at all. It is not that we are attending to wrong things about
the other, or in the wrong ways, but that we are simply failing to attend to an-
other. This is a form of arrogance, as Lugones argues, but is not obviously helped
by equanimity practices that uproot craving and aversion: if I barely notice that
you are in the room, I’m unlikely to form cravings or aversions toward you.
When we are simply not paying attention, or barely paying attention, to others,
another skill is needed: mindfulness, the ability to place one’s attention and the
careful maintenance of that attention. Garfield calls mindfulness “the necessary
mechanism for focusing the mind on the morally relevant dimensions of moral
situations and on one’s own moral responsibility” (Garfield 2012, 4). It is what
combats “the natural tendency to mindless action” (Garfield 2012, 6). This is be-
cause immoral actions—​including actions that maintain systems of oppression—​
are not always caused by hostile or even fearful motivations. Sometimes they are
“mindless,” caused by negligence, distraction, or forgetting. Without mindfulness
“it is possible to remain utterly inattentive to one’s own moral life, failing to notice
situations that call for moral response, failing even to recognize one’s own moral
attitudes, dispositions and motivations” (Garfield 2012, 6). Mindfulness, then, is a
corrective to failing to pay attention at all, or paying insufficient attention.

Buddhist philosophers and feminist philosophers have, in different ways, argued

for the epistemic and moral significance of loving attention and dangers of ar-
rogant, self-​centered habits of attention. Drawing on both traditions, I have
attempted to give an account of loving attention that can respond to some of the
worries that are articulated in feminist literature (the dangers of loving attention
in the context of oppression) and those that are articulated in Buddhist traditions
(the ways in which we can cultivate or fail to cultivate loving attention). With
regard to the latter, I have argued that mindfulness and equanimity together
allow us to cultivate loving attention by responding to particular obstacles
 Equanimity and the Loving Eye 375

to such cultivation. These skills are conceptually well-​suited to respond to the

obstacles to loving attention: equanimity, as freedom from craving and aversion,
is the right kind of concept to address the obstacles of negative emotionality,
self-​centeredness, and indifference; mindfulness, as the placement and careful
maintenance of attention, is well-​suited to respond to the obstacle of not paying
attention and not holding attention.

Notes

1. See Fourlas (2015), Frye (1983), Lugones (this volume), Murdoch (1970), Mulvey
(1975), Snow (2005), and Yancy (2008).
2. See Patrul Rinpoche’s story of the sage Asanga for an illustration of the importance of
the loving gaze (1994, 211–​212).
3. See, for example, Khenpo Ngawang Pelzang (2004, 140–​143).
4. I use “loving attention” where Murdoch would simply use “attention.” On Murdoch’s
view attention is by definition loving: “I use the word ‘attention,’ which I borrow from
Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality”
(Murdoch 1970, 33).
5. See Snow (2005).
6. Murdoch equates “attention” and, what I would call, “loving attention” (1970, 33). For
problems with defining attention as loving and just, see Bommarito (2018).
7. See also Edwards (2016) and Harris (2012).
8. See also Harris (2012) on the intersections of Womanist and Buddhist conceptions of
and practices of self-​love.
9. In fact, the fact that this moral change is entirely internal, an act of the indi-
vidual agent’s will, is central to her overall argument in The Sovereignty of Good
(Murdcoch 1970).
10. For two excellent examples, see Path of Purification and Patrul Rinpoche (1994),
which each discuss methods of cultivating equanimity.
11. See McRae (2017a).
12. That equanimity enables love (and other positive mental states, such as compassion
and joy) is a core feature of the Buddhist moral psychological concept of the four
boundless qualities (brahmavihāras, tshad med gzhi): equanimity, love, compassion,
and sympathetic joy. See Path of Purification (part IX), Patrul Rinpoche (1994, ch. 2,
part 1), and McRae (2017a, 2017b).
13. This gets tricky in cases when the desire seems altruistic, such as wanting another’s
suffering to end. But it is important to distinguish between wanting another’s suf-
fering to stop for her own sake and wanting it to stop because you experience it as
burdensome. Consider, for example, wanting a child to stop crying because you want
her to be happy and wanting her to stop crying because her crying is inconvenient
or unpleasant for you. The first, but not the second, is conducive to loving attention.
I thank Nic Bommarito for pressing me on this point.
376 Memory and Emotion

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Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Orlando: Harcourt Books.
Watzl, Sebastian. 2011. “The Nature of Attention.” Philosophy Compass 6 (11): 842–​853.
Yancy, George. 2008. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Yancy, George. 2014. “Interpretive Profiles on Charles Johnson’s Reflections on Trayvon
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Western Journal of Black Studies 38 (1): 1–​12.
 Contributors

Iva Apostolova is an associate professor of philosophy at the Dominican University

College in Ottawa, Canada. She is a contributor to and coeditor of Ageing in an Ageing
Society: Critical Reflections (Equinox, 2019) and an author of articles published in
Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, and
Bioethics.

Lynne Rudder Baker was Emerita Professor of philosophy, formerly Distinguished

Professor, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In addition to her five books,
published by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Princeton
University Press, she published numerous articles and book chapters and lectured all
over the world. Lists of her publications and presentations may be found at www.peo​
ple.umass.edu/​lrb.

Susan J. Brison is professor of philosophy and Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor
for the Study of Ethics and Human Values at Dartmouth College. She has held vis-
iting positions at Tufts, NYU, and Princeton and fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. The author of
Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton University Press, 2002),
she has published numerous articles on gender-​based violence and on freedom of
expression in scholarly journals and in the popular press.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature

and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the
author of seventeen books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (Routledge, 1990) and The Force of Nonviolence (Verso, 2020). Butler is also
active in several human rights organizations, currently serving on the board of the
Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice
for Peace.

Ashby Butnor is an assistant professor of philosophy at Colorado State University.

She is the coeditor, with Jennifer McWeeny, of Asian and Feminist Philosophies in
Dialogue: Liberating Traditions (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her teaching and
research interests include East Asian philosophies, phenomenology, care ethics, fem-
inist epistemology, and the ethics of global poverty.
380 Contributors

Vrinda Dalmiya is professor of philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. She

is the author of Caring to Know: Comparative Care Ethics, Feminist Epistemology, and
the Mahābhārata (Oxford University Press, 2016) and coeditor of Exploring Agency
in the Mahābhārata: Ethical and Political Dimensions of Dharma (Routledge, 2018).
Her articles have appeared in journals like Hypatia, Sophia, Journal of the Indian
Council of Philosophical Research, and Journal of Social Philosophy.

E. Díaz-​León is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona.

Before this, she taught at the University of Manitoba. She received her PhD from the
University of Sheffield. She specializes in philosophy of mind and language and phi-
losophy of gender, race, and sexuality. Her articles have appeared in the Australasian
Journal of Philosophy, Ergo, European Journal of Philosophy, Hypatia, Mind,
Philosophical Studies, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and Ratio, among others.

Paula Droege is a teaching professor in the Philosophy Department at Pennsylvania

State University. Her research on philosophical theories of consciousness proposes
an essential role for temporal representation in conscious states. She is the author
of Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness (John Benjamins, 2003), The
Evolution of Consciousness: Representing the Present Moment (Bloomsbury, 2022),
and articles on the role of consciousness in memory, free will, and delusion. Her work
in feminism focuses on the relation between epistemic and structural constraints on
autonomy.

Gabrielle Benette Jackson is a lecturer in philosophy at Stanford University. She is a

specialist in philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and feminist philosophy, with an
interest in recent cognitive science. Jackson’s work has appeared in Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences and European Journal of Philosophy, among other
publications.

Anne J. Jacobson’s interdisciplinary research draws on philosophy of mind/​cognitive

neuroscience, feminist philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Recent philosoph-
ical work includes Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Sciences
of the Mind (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and the coedited Neurofeminism: Issues
at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Science (Palgrave Macmillan,
2012). She has been the director of the University of Houston’s Center for Neuro-​
Engineering and Cognitive Science from 2005.

Susan James is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, London. Among her

publications are Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early-​Modern Philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 1997), The Political Writings of Margaret Cavendish
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The
 Contributors 381

Theologico-​Political Treatise (Oxford University Press, 2012), and some papers on the
history of feminist philosophy.

Janine Jones is an associate professor of philosophy at University of North Carolina

Greensboro. She is author of the articles “Caster Semenya: Reasoning Up Front
with Race” (2014) and “When Black Female Presence Is (Seemingly) Not Invited
to The Second Sex” (2019), among others, and coeditor of Pursuing Trayvon
Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics
(Lexington Books, 2014). She is on the editorial board of Simone de Beauvoir
Studies and is a member of the Black Internationalist Unions, a unit of the Abolition
Collective.

Amy Kind is the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna

College. She has authored two introductory textbooks: Philosophy of Mind: The Basics
(Routledge, 2020) and Persons and Personal Identity (Polity, 2015). She has also ed-
ited two volumes, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination (Routledge,
2016) and Philosophy of Mind in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Routledge, 2018), and
has coedited two collections, Knowledge through Imagination (Oxford University
Press, 2016) and Epistemic Uses of Imagination (Routledge, 2021).

María Lugones was professor of Latin American and Caribbean area studies and
comparative literature at Binghamton University, where she also directed the Center
for Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture. She was the author of Pilgrimages/​
Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003) as well as a number of foundational articles in feminist philosophy,
queer theory, and decolonial studies. She was the recipient of the Society for Women
in Philosophy Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award in 2015.

Matthew MacKenzie is professor of philosophy and department chair at Colorado

State University. He specializes in Buddhist philosophy, classical Indian phi-
losophy, and the philosophy of mind, with a special focus on consciousness
and self-​consciousness. His articles have appeared in Philosophy East and West,
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Asian Philosophy, and Journal of
Consciousness Studies, among other journals. He is the author of Buddhist Philosophy
and the Embodied Mind (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2022).

Keya Maitra is the Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities and

professor of philosophy at University of North Carolina Asheville. Her articles
have been published in Hypatia, Asian Philosophy, Philosophy in the Contemporary
World, Southwest Philosophy Review, International Journal of Philosophical Studies,
and many anthologies. She is the author of two books, Philosophy of the Bhagavad
382 Contributors

Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and On Putnam

(Cengage Learning, 2003), and a coauthor of Ethics of Governance: Moral Limits of
Policy Decisions (Springer, 2021).

Emily McRae is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico.

She specializes in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, ethics, moral psychology, and fem-
inism. She has published articles in both Western and Asian philosophical journals,
including American Philosophical Quarterly, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Journal
of Religious Ethics, and Philosophy East and West. Together with Jay Garfield, McRae
published a translation of the nineteenth-​century Tibetan master Patrul Rinpoche’s
Essential Jewel of Holy Practice (Wisdom Books, 2017).

Jennifer McWeeny is an associate professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic

Institute. She specializes in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy
of gender, feminist philosophy, and decolonial studies. McWeeny is coeditor of
two books: Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones
(State University of New York Press, 2019) and Asian and Feminist Philosophies in
Dialogue: Liberating Traditions (Columbia University Press, 2014). She is a recipient
of the Fulbright US Scholar National Research Award (France, 2019–​20) and Editor
in Chief of Simone de Beauvoir Studies.

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of

Connecticut Storrs. She has held the Laurie Chair at Rutgers University and the
Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University Chicago. She currently works in
four main areas of philosophy: philosophy of action, feminist ethics and aesthetics, and
human rights. She has published five monographs. The most recent of those is Victims’
Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Jennifer Radden is Emerita Professor of philosophy at the University of

Massachusetts Boston. She has published extensively on mental health concepts, the
history of medicine, and ethical and policy aspects of psychiatric theory and practice.
Her books include On Delusion (Routledge, 2010) and Melancholic Habits: Burton’s
Anatomy & the Mind Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Naomi Scheman is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and of Gender, Women, and

Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her account of the social con-
struction of psychological phenomena, begun in her doctoral dissertation in 1978,
informs her subsequent work in feminist epistemology and metaphysics, much of
which has been collected in two volumes: Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge,
Authority, and Privilege (Routledge, 1993) and Shifting Ground: Knowledge and
Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness (Oxford University Press, 2011).
 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

ableism Anderson, Elizabeth, 80

the mind and, 26n.22 anger, 19–​20, 249–​51, 258, 366, 372
mind-​body dualism and, 16 borderline personality disorder and,
activism 209, 210–​11
mental content and, 70 grief and, 349–​50, 356–​58
affect, 190, 321 horizontal, 121n.2
as form of sense-​making, 191, 193–​94, See also emotion
196, 198 Antony, Louise, 48, 84n.7
loving attention and, 362, 366, 371–​73 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 9, 27n.44
agency Apostolova, Iva, 20, 21
action and, 355–​57, 359–​60 Araujo, Gwen, 347–​48, 360n.4
bodily, 232–​34, 234n.10 Aristotle, 141, 247
capacity and, 146 Arnold, Dan, 24n.1
determinism and, 268 arrogant perception, 106–​8, 111–​12, 120–​21
embodiment and, 126–​27 by women, 106–​8
of material world, 260–​61 artificial intelligence, 4, 22–​23, 272–​73
passivity and, 144–​46 See also computer intelligence; machine
personhood and, 11 intelligence; Turing Test
in phenomenology, 231–​33 assimilation, 118, 267
reductionism and, 268 Ásta, 13
self and, 9, 261 attention
sex and gender and, 230, 231–​32 in Buddhism, 20, 21, 363
agentic self Western approaches to, 363
agentic bias, 141 See also loving attention
autonomy and, 146–​49 autonomy, 9, 11, 22, 134n.10, 146–52,
capacitation and, 141, 152, 154n.16 154n.6, 178, 185
interactivity and, 141, 142–​44, 148–​49, 152 agentic self and, 146–​49
oppression and, 149–​52 enactivism and, 192–​95, 200
passivity and, 141, 142–​44, 145, 146–​ oppression and, 149–​52
49, 151–​52 passivity and, 140, 152
suffering and, 142 relational, 127, 192
vulnerability and, 141–​42 Ayala, Saray, 21–​22
Akins, Kathleen, 265–​66
Albahari, Miri, 10, 24n.1 Baker, Lynne Rudder, ix, 126–27, 257
Alcoff, Linda Martín, 9, 19, 223, 332, 336–​ on first-​person perspective, 8, 10
37, 339 Balog, Katalin, 24n.1
Alexander, M. Jacqui, 19 Balzac, Honoré de, 168
Améry, Jean, 229, 317–​19, 325 Banaji, Mahzarin R., 262
analytic philosophy, 1, 239, 255–56, 262, Barnes, Allison, 94
269n.6, 294 Bartky, Sandra, 16–​17, 203, 231, 368–​69
sexism and, 70 Barvosa, Edwina, 9
384 Index

Beauvoir, Simone de, 4–​5, 186–​87, 222–​23 Braidotti, Rosi, 22–​23, 318–​19
on gender, 175–76, 201, 226–27, 231 Braithwaite Victoria, 263, 267–​68
critiques of, 5 Brentano, Franz, 71–​72
immanence, 275–​77, 278–​80, 291n.18 Brison, Susan J., 9, 11–​12, 19, 21, 144, 160
influence of Du Bois and Wright, 26n.24 on memory and trauma, 169n.8, 335, 343n.1
on the self, 9, 315–16, 326n.8 Brizendine, Louann, 6
Beckett, Samuel, 325–​26, 327n.20 Brooks, David, 81
behaviorism Brooks, Ron, 207
classical, 300–​1 Brown, Jonathon D., 153n.13
sexual orientations and, 294, 296, 300–​1 Brown, Michael, 89
Ben-​Ze’ev, Aaron, 19 Brush, Pippa, 234n.4
Bergomi, Claudia, 124–​25 Buddhaghosa, 367, 369, 373–​74
Bernecker, Sven, 19, 341 Buddhism
Bettcher, Talia M., 22 attachment and, 373
Bingham, Rachel, 130–​31 attention in, 20, 21, 363
Birke, Lydia, 128–​29 concentration in, 363
Black feminism, 25n.16, 282–​84 craving and aversion in, 372–​74
Black fungibility, 88–​89, 100n.5 love in, 366–​67, 373
core features of, 91–​92 mindfulness in, 362–​63
empathy and, 100n.5 philosophy of mind, 362
white empathy and, 98–​100 See also ethics, Buddhist
See also white fungibility Burge, Tyler, 253n.8
Black studies, 272–​73 externalism of, 79, 83
Block, Ned, 3 individualism, critique of, 3, 73–​74, 75, 76–​
Bloom, Paul, 92 78, 84nn.5–6
Bluhm, Robyn, 124–​25, 126 Busfield, Joan, 126
bodies, Black, 282–​84 Buss, Sarah, 11, 139
Black minds and, 87–​88, 91–​92 on autonomy, 146–​52, 153–​54n.15
violence and, 87–​88, 89, 91–92, 284 human flourishing condition, 146–​47, 148–​
body, the 49, 150, 154n.16
character and, 160, 161–​63 on passivity, 140, 152
emotion and, 250, 253n.11 on suffering, 149, 153n.12
femininity and, 156, 164–​65, 167, 208 on victims of oppression, 149–​52, 153n.14
racial identity and, 169n.13 Butler, Judith, 13–​14, 15, 84n.11, 355
as receptacle, 158–​60 on Beauvoir, 226–​27
self and, 242 on Foucault, 226–​27
speaking surfaces metaphors, 223–​27 on gender performativity, 190–​91, 199–​200,
See also embodiment 201, 204, 227, 231, 232–​33
Bohr, Niels, 284–​85 on grief, 347, 350
borderline personality disorder (BDP), 14, 207 on the historical, 84n.10
characteristics of, 208–​10 on Merleau-Ponty, 79–​80, 226–​27
cooperation and, 212, 217 on relational self, 359–​60
as disability, 217 on sex and gender, 230–​31
empathy and, 210–​11 on sexuality, 80
neuroscience and, 208, 209, 211–​13 speaking surfaces metaphors in, 221–​22, 224,
personal/​subpersonal distinction, 213–​14 226–​27, 229
social constructionist view on, 211 Butnor, Ashby, 9, 14, 15, 82–​83
as social phenomenon, 213 Byrne, Eleanor, 133
women, traits associated with, 210–​11,
217, 218n.2 Cahill, Ann J., 153n.6, 291n.15
Bordo, Susan, 221–​22, 224–​26, 229–​30, 232–​ Calhoun, Cheshire, 294
33, 265 Campbell, Sue, 20, 331–​34, 336–​37, 343n.4
Borland, Kathrine, 332–​33 capacitation
Braden, Ann, 98–​100 agentic self and, 141, 152, 154n.16

Castañeda, Héctor-​Neri, 44
causation
causal closure, 26n.31, 244, 245
interactive model, 260
mechanistic, 183, 283–84, 286–87
mental, 286, 341
new materialisms and, 259–60
Newtonian, 283–84, 286–87
physical, 258–59
Cavendish, Margaret, 273–74, 285, 290nn.6–​7
See also panpsychism
Celan, Paul, 318–​19
Chalmers, David J., 15–​16, 24n.1, 75–​76,
80, 284–​85
extended mind hypothesis, 343n.6
mental attribution and, 277–​78
panpsychism and, 273–​74, 281, 285
zombie conceivability problems, 24n.5
Charlesworth, Simon, 22
Cheng, Sen, 19
Chessler, Phyllis, 125–​26
Choi, Sungho, 297–​98, 299–​300
citizenship
whiteness and, 70, 81–​82
Clark, Andy, 75–​76, 343n.6
class
enactivism and, 198
mind and, 6–​7
mental attribution and, 272
Code, Lorraine, 127, 334
cognition
animal, 263
dualistic model of, 340
embodied cognition thesis, 337–​38, 343n.8,
343n.9, 344n.15
cognition, embodied, 191–​92, 337–​38, 342,
343n.8, 343n.9, 344n.15
consciousness and, 134n.9
enactivism and, 190–​91, 195
4E cognition theory, 13, 15
cognitive ethology, 17, 264, 265
cognitive neuroscience (CNS), 207–​8,
218n.3
borderline personality disorder and, 208
feminist antipathy toward, 211–​12
naturalizing function in, 215
normativity in, 214–​17
patriarchy and, 14
philosophical objections to, 213–​14, 215
reading and, 215–​17
See also neuroscience
cognitive psychology
disorder in, 123
cognitive science, 1
Index 385
cognitivism, 124
critiques of, 124–​25
Cohen, Carl I., 133n.3
colonialism
dehumanization and, 279–80
mind-body dualism and, 16
violence and, 87, 284
Combahee River Collective, 25n.16
computer intelligence, 64
as fixed, 60–​62
sex and, 54, 58–​59
thinking and, 63, 68n.13
See also artificial intelligence; machine
intelligence; Turing test
Conboy, Katie, 224
consciousness, 2
animal, 255–​56, 263–​68
double consciousness, 7
embodied, 134n.9
false consciousness, 16–​17
feminist consciousness, 16–​17
multiple consciousness, 26n.23, 327n.17
self-consciousness, 2, 7, 88, 202, 264
Copeland, Jack, 67n.5
Coseru, Christian, 24n.1
Cosmelli, Diego, 195–​96
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 25n.16
critical race theory, 2–3, 364–65, 370
Culbertson, Roberta, 321
Cummins, Robert, 217
Dalmiya, Vrinda, 9, 20, 21–​22
Darwin, Charles, 256
Das, Veena, 145, 347
Davidson, Donald, 244–​45, 248, 250,
253n.7
Davis, Kathy, 222–​23
De Caro, Mario, 13
decolonial studies, 273
See also Lugones, María; Quijano, Aníbal
dehumanization, 273, 279–80, 282, 291n.11
colonialism and, 279–80
De Jaegher, Hanne, 198
Delbo, Charlotte, 313, 318, 319–​20, 323,
326n.1
Deliovsky, Katerina, 90–​91
Dembroff, Robin, A., 21–​22, 294, 295–​96, 305
on desire, 307
on dispositionalism, 296–​300, 307
Dennett, Daniel, 84n.12, 213, 333
Descartes, René, 4–5, 314
method of doubt, 20, 351–52, 355
mind-​body dualism, 15–​16, 207–​8, 266
See also mind-​body dualism
386 Index
desire
arousal, 303
sexuality and, 175, 181, 185–​87
sexual orientations and, 301–​5, 307, 308n.4
de Sousa, Ronald, 19
determinism
agency and, 268
free will and, 260
de Vignemont, Frédérique, 10, 97
Díaz-​León, E., 18, 74–​75, 84n.7
Di Paolo, Ezequiel, 192, 195, 196, 198
disability, 11, 22
borderline personality disorder as, 217
cognitive, 131–32
mental attribution and, 272
disability theory, 22, 216–17
dispositionalism, 296–​300, 301–​2, 307
bidimensional, 298, 299–​301
sexual orientation and, 294, 296–​301,
302, 305–​8
Döring, Sabine A., 19
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 52
Dotson, Kristie, 131–​32
Drayson, Zoe, 15–​16, 134n.4
Droege, Paula, 17, 18, 19, 267–​68
dualism. See mind-​body dualism
Du Bois, W. E. B., 9
double consciousness, 7
influence on Beauvoir, 26n.24
Dullstein, Monika, 95
Dupré, John, 243, 244–​45, 246, 248
eliminativism, 15, 247–​48
embeddedness
mental disorder and, 126–​28, 129–​30
of mind, 190
embodied cognition. See cognition, embodied
embodiment, 3, 10–​11
agency and, 126–​27
of consciousness, 134n.9
enactivism and, 190–​91, 192, 195–​96,
198, 204–​5
feminists of embodiment, 223–​24, 229–​33
first-​person perspective and, 44
in 4E cognition theory, 15
identity and, 126–​27
of inferiority, 203
of mind, 126–​27, 190, 207–​8
of oppression, 203
personal identity and, 157, 158, 159–​67
personhood and, 126–​27
of sex and gender, 221, 222–​23, 229–​
32, 234n.2
sexual difference and, 167
emotion
the body and, 250, 253n.11
as form of sense-​making, 193–​94
selfhood and, 352–​53
See also anger; grief; love; empathy
empathy, 3
borderline personality disorder and, 210–​11
compassion and, 94
core features of, 91–​92
enactivism and, 183–​87, 190
intersubjectivity and, 197
Lugones on, 365–​66
models of, 94–​97, 98
pain and, 73–​74, 89–​90, 95–​97
perception and, 90, 95–97, 204
race and, 8–​9
self-​empathy, 86, 87, 90–​91, 97–100
See also emotion
empathy, white, 86
disappearance of Black people and, 88–​89,
90, 91, 97–​98
self-​empathy and, 90–​91, 92–​93
white fungibility and, 98–​100
enactivism, 2, 3, 14, 124–​25, 190–​96
autonomy and, 192–​95, 200
embodied cognition and, 190–​91, 195, 196
embodiment and, 190–​91, 192, 195–​96,
198, 204–​5
emergence and, 192, 193, 194–​95
empathy and, 190
essentialism and, 191
experience and, 192, 195
feminist theory and, 190–​91, 192, 201–​
2, 203–​5
gender and, 198–​202
intersubjectivity and, 183–​87, 190
power and, 190–​91
sense-​making and, 192, 193–​94, 195, 196,
197–​98, 200–​5
subjectivity and, 204–​5
equanimity, 350, 362, 375n.10, 375n.12
loving attention and, 372–75
epistemology, 242
feminist philosophy and, 70–​71
physical sciences and, 239
See also feminist epistemology
epistemic justice, 123, 125–​26, 131–​32
essentialism
enactivism and, 191
personhood and, 46–​47
ethics, 22, 23, 24n.3, 141, 192, 242, 262, 314,
362, 369
ethics, Buddhist, 20, 362, 369, 371–72
freedom in, 372–74
 Index 387

ethics, feminist, 268, 364 externalism and, 74

ethics of care, 124, 359–60 materialism and, 17, 255–56, 259–​68
ethics of perception, 366 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 283–​84, 286–​87, 289
externalism, 2, 70–​71 first-​person perspective, 10
feminist theory and, 74 defined, 43–​46
embodiment and, 44
Fanon, Frantz, 288–​89 gender and, 8, 41, 50–​52
dehumanization, 279–​80 gender freedom and, 50
racial nonbeing, 275–​76, 278–​80, 289–​77 gender identity and, 43, 44
Sartre, critique of, 7 language and, 43–​46, 47–​48, 50
Faria, Paulo, 344n.13 as property of person, 41
Fatima, Saba, 9 self-​concept and, 44–​46, 47, 48–​50, 52
Fausto-​Sterling, Anne, 42, 67–​68n.10, Fodor, Jerry A., 244–​45
128, 222–23, 259 forgiveness
Fehr, Carla, 127 in Mahābhārata, Pūjanī story, 357–​58
femininity, 52 self and, 357–​59
attributes of, 139 Foucault, Michel, 181, 226–​27
the body and, 156, 164–​65, 167, 208 speaking surface metaphors in, 234n.3
speaking surfaces metaphors and, 225–​26 Frankfurt, Harry, 139–​40
Turing test and, 65 Franklin, Benjamin, 93–​87
feminism Franklin, Cynthia, 347–​48
philosophy of mind and, 70–71, 255–56 freedom, 16, 261–62
pluralistic, 105 reproductive, 316
testimonial competence and, 131–​33 in Buddhist ethics, 372–74
feminist epistemology, 255–56, 264–65, 267 French, Robert, 55–​56, 63, 68n.12
feminist ethics and, 268 Freud, Sigmund, 161–​62, 336–​37, 339
non-​dominant differences and, 110–​11 Freudian analysis, critiques of, 126
philosophy of mind and, 268 sexuality, theory of, 177–​78, 188–​89n.2
plurality in, 105 Fricker, Miranda, 131–​32
See also epistemology Froese, Tom, 196
feminist philosophy Frost, Samantha, 260
attribution of mind and, 273, 275–76 Frye, Marilyn, 19–​20, 249, 365–​66, 371, 373
consciousness and, 16–​17 on arrogant perception, 106–​7
defined, 1, 24n.2 on loving perception, 107, 108, 109, 111–​12
gender&race&, 3–4, 26n.21 functionalism, 2, 15, 27n.38, 247
mental phenomena in, 2–​3
neuroscience and, 207–​8 Gadamer, Hans-​Georg, 117–​18
philosophy of mind and, 1–​3, 70–71, 156 Gage, Frances D., 25n.14
physicalism, critique of, 16, 239, 257–58 Gallagher, Shaun, 24n.1, 124–​25, 134n.4,
scope of, 24n.3 153n.2, 197
theories of emotion, 19–​21 Ganeri, Jonardon, 10, 24n.1
feminist philosophy of mind Garfield, Jay, 24n.1, 374
defined, 3–6, 290 Garner, Eric, 88
emotion and, 23 Garry, Ann, 16–​17, 77
future of, 21–​23 gaze
intersectionality and, 22, 25n.19 arrogant, 364–​66, 372–​73
mental disorder and, 126–​28 loving, 365–​67, 373
naturalism and, 23 male, 228, 234n.7
normativity and, 23 of masculine sexuality, 176, 182–​85
self and, 23 of white women, 365–​66
social location and, 23 scientific, 207
feminist theory gender
disorder, view of, 123 agency and, 230, 231–​32
enactivism and, 190–​91, 192, 201–​2, 203–​5 Black minds and, 87–​88
388 Index

gender (cont.) Haraway, Donna J., 22–​23, 228

coloniality and, 279–​80 Harding, Sandra, 131, 228, 264–​65, 267
definitions of, 41–​43, 295 Harfouch, John, 290n.2, 291n.9
enactivism and, 198–​202 Harper, Philip, 88, 93
externalism and, 75 Hartman, Saidiya V., 86–87, 89–90, 91, 96
first-​person perspective and, 8, 41, 50–​52 Haslanger, Sally, 13, 77–​78, 294, 306
language and, 47–​48 on Black pain, 96
mental attribution and, 272 Haugeland, John, 246
mind-body dualism and, 11–​12, 156, 167 Hegel, G. W. F., 120, 326n.3
naturalism and, 13 Heim, Maria, 369
neuroscience and, 210 Heinämaa, Sara, 25n.20, 232
normativity and, 50–​51 Held, Virginia, 326n.6
performativity of, 190–​91, 199–​200, 201, Herman, Judith, 313–​14, 318, 326n.4
204, 227 Herr, Ranjoo Seodu, 9
self-​concept and, 41, 49 heteronormativity, 178
versus sex, 13, 41–​43, 67n.2, 259, 295–​96 motherhood and, 347–48
social construction of, 175–​76, 249 heterosexism
socialization and, 64–​65 mind-​body dualism and, 16
stereotypes, 47–​48, 52, 139–​40 heterosexuality, 14, 176, 186, 300, 307
as strategy, 201 coloniality and, 279–​80
use of term, 25n.20 HIJOS, 331–​32, 334
gender identity, 42–​43 Hirsch, Marianne, 321
first-​person perspective and, 43, 44, 46–​49 Hodges, Andrew, 56
maturity and, 50 Hoffman, Eva, 318–​19, 322
normativity and, 50–​51 Holland, Margaret, 364, 367–​68
gender&race& hooks, bell, 5, 25n.16, 222–​23, 264
defined, 6–​9, 25n.19 Hornsby, Jennifer, 13, 213, 243, 244–​45, 246
mind and, 7, 21–22 Horst, Stephen
See also gender; race; class; sexuality; disability definition of naturalism, 12–​13, 26n.30
Genova, Judith, 57, 58–​59 Hudson, Emily, 360n.6
Gilligan, Carol, 6, 210 Huizinga, Johan, 117–​19
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 125–​26 humanity
Gilman, Sander, 126 the mind and, 86
Goff, Philip, 280–​81 white men and, 93–94, 279
Goldie, Peter, 19 white women and, 100n.6
Golumbia, David, 70–​71, 76, 77, 83n.2 Hume, David, 45, 214
Gordon, Lewis, 276–​77 Husserl, Edmund, 234n.8
Gould, Stephen Jay, 6–​7 hypermateriality, 272–​74, 282–​85, 286–​
Grahn, Judy, 251–​52 87, 288–​89
Greenwald, Anthony G., 262
grief identity
attachment and, 351 embodiment and, 126–​27
maternal, 346–​48, 351, 355, 359–​60 memory and, 10
method of grief, 20, 348, 351–55, 357 See also gender identity; personal identity; self
relational self and, 347, 348–​55 immigration, 81–​83
trust and, 348–​49, 351–​52, 354–​55, 357–​58 whiteness and, 70
See also emotion implicit bias, 50, 98, 218n.3, 262
Griffin, Donald, 264 individualism, 2, 3, 70, 73, 74, 76–77, 84n.5,
Grosz, Elizabeth, 221–​22, 224, 226, 229, 230, 128, 190, 192
232–​33, 234n.5 in philosophy of mind, 245
on freedom, 261–​62 intelligence
continuum of, 60–​63, 68n.12
Hacking, Ian, 10, 26n.29, 248 sex and, 64–​66
semantic contagion, 20, 331, 332, 336–​37, 342 Turing test and, 64–66
 Index 389

See also artificial intelligence; computer Lenat, Douglas B., 57, 67n.7
intelligence; machine intelligence Levi, Primo, 320, 321, 325
intentionality, 43, 72, 79, 80, 193 Levine, Joseph, 15–​16
interactivity, 140–​41 Lewis, David, 10, 157, 159
agentic self and, 141, 142–​44, 148–​49, 152 Lewis, Janet, 167–​68
interdependence, 76–​77, 365–​66 Lincoln, Abraham, 96–​97
of Women of Color, 111 Lloyd, Genevieve, 126
intersectionality, 5, 22, 25n.19, 359 Locke, John, 10, 317, 326n.11
hooks and, 25n.16 personal identity, theory of, 161, 332
intersex, 42, 50, 259 on the self, 319, 332
intersubjectivity Lorde, Audre, 19–​20
empathy and, 197 on horizontal anger, 121n.2
sexuality and, 179 on non-dominant differences, 110
love, 18–​20, 21, 247
Jackson, Gabrielle Benette, 14–​15 being at ease in a “world” and, 115
Jackson, Zakkiyah Iman, 283–​84, 286–​87 in Buddhism, 366–​67, 368, 369, 371–​74,
Jacob, Pierre, 97 375n.12
Jacobson, Anne, 14–15 dependency and, 355
Jaggar, Alison M., 19–20, 204 grief and, 349–​52, 357–​58
James, Susan, 11–​12, 239, 332–​33 happiness and, 366
James, William, 338, 363 identification and, 105–​10, 111–​12, 365–​66
Janoff-​Bulman, Ronnie, 326n.4 self-​directed, 369
Jaworska, Agnieska, 352–​53 See also emotion
Johnson, Mark, 1 loving attention, 364
Jones, Janine, 8–​9, 22, 87, 88, 284–85, 290n.8 Buddhist theories of, 362, 367, 368–​
Jones-​Rogers, Stephanie E., 98–​99 70, 371–​75
cultivation of, 371–​75
Kafka, Franz, 226–​27, 234n.3, 319 defined, 363, 367
Kant, Immanuel, 290n.2 equanimity and, 362, 372–​75, 375n.12
Ka-​Tzetnik 135633, 318–​19 feminist theories of, 362, 367, 370–​71
Khader, Serene, 153n.14 loving perception, relation to, 364
Kim, Jaegwon, 243–​45, 247–​48, 253n.6 mindfulness and, 362, 372, 374–​75
Kind, Amy, 8, 9, 22 obstacles to, 371–​75
King, Deborah K., 16–​17 loving perception, 107, 108, 109, 111–​12, 364
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 92–​93 Lugones, María, ix, 5, 12, 134n.7, 153n.10, 264,
King, Tiffany Lethabo, 91 373, 374
Kingsolver, Barbara, 324–​25 on colonial dehumanization, 279–​80
Kitossa, Tamir, 90–​91 on common sense, 252
Kittay, Eva, 9 on empathy, 365–66
knowledge on love, 373
gendered hierarchy of, 258 on plurality in theory, 239
Kriegel, Uriah, 24n.1 on white women’s gaze, 365–​66
Kripke, Saul, 72–​73 on stereotypes, 203
Kuhn, Thomas, 13 “world”–​traveling, 11, 202–​3, 370–​71
Lyons, Laura, 347–​48
Langer, Lawrence, 322–​23
language Macarthur, David, 13
first-​person perspective and, 43–​46, 47–​ Mach, Ernst, 338
48, 50 machine intelligence, 57–​58, 60–​61, 63,
gender and, 47–​48 68n.11, 68n.13
Latour, Bruno, 13 See also artificial intelligence; computer
Laub, Dori, 323 intelligence; Turing test
Leboeuf, Céline, 9 Mackenzie, Catriona, 134n.10, 192, 326n.8
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 290n.6 MacKenzie, Matthew, 10, 14, 15, 82–​83
390 Index
MacKinnon, Catherine, 16–​17, 228
Mahābhārata, Pūjanī story, 346–​49, 350, 351–​
55, 356–​60
Maiese, Michelle, 134n.9
Mair, Nancy, 222–​23
Maitra, Keya, 8, 9
Mamoya, Nakayama, 351
Marchetti, Giancarlo, 26n.29
Marchetti, Sarin, 26n.29
Marx, Karl, 256, 326n.3
Marxism
praxis, 260
masculinity, 52, 258
mind and, 156–57, 164–​65, 167, 315
personal identity and, 158, 168
sexuality and, 181–​84, 186–​87
Mason-​Grant, John, 198–​99, 202
materialism
causality and, 259–​60
feminist theory and, 17, 255–56, 259–​68
mental phenomena and, 255–​56
the mind and, 256
new materialisms, 259–​60, 272–​73, 289
McCarthy, Jane Ribbens, 353–​54
McLaren, Margaret, 234n.4
McRae, Emily, 20–​21, 22, 366, 367, 373
McWeeny, Jennifer, 9, 17–​18, 21–​22, 84n.8
Medina, José, 22
Medina, Nadia, 224
memes, 80–​81, 84n.12
memory
archival model, 330, 336, 337
autobiographical, 330–​32, 333–​34, 337, 339
collective, 334
embodiment and, 330
episodism, 331
in feminist literature, 19
neutral monism and, 331–​32, 337–​39, 340–​
43, 343n.8
personal identity and, 159–​60, 333
philosophy of mind and, 19
psychological continuity model, 332
reconstruction of, 341–​42
relational model, 330–​36, 341–​42
repisodic, 335–​36, 343n.5
re-​remembering, 335–​36
self and, 360n.5
trauma and, 18–​21, 159–​60, 163, 164, 169n.8,
317, 319–​20, 321, 330–​32, 334, 335
Mendoza, José Jorge, 70, 81–​83
mental attribution, 290n.4
attribution patterns, 273, 287–​90
degree attribution, 280–​81, 282
epistemology and, 272–​73
equal attribution, 277–​79, 287–​88
kind attribution, 280, 281–​82
mechanistic attribution, 284–​86
mental constitution and, 282–​87
metaphysics of, 273, 287, 288–​90
ontology of, 272–​73, 289
organicist attribution, 284–​86
panpsychism and, 273–​74
unequal attribution, 275–​76, 277–​78, 287–​89
mental constitution
mental attribution and, 282–​87
Newtonian causality, 283–​87
mental content, 71–​74
feminist theory of, 70–​71, 74–​78, 79–​83
teleosemantic theories of, 77–83
See also intentionality
mental disorder
depression and anxiety, 130–​31, 134n.15
embeddedness and, 126–​28, 129–​30
epistemic injustice and, 131–​32
feminist thought and, 123–​33
genetic explanations of, 129
medico-​cognitivist models of, 123–​30
signs and symptoms of, 130–​33
social construction and, 124–​25
women and, 125–​26
Merchant, Carolyn, 16, 282–​83, 286–​87
Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice, 13–​14, 226–​27, 234n.8
decontextualized female body in, 181–​
84, 186–​87
Freud, critique of, 177–​78
master-​slave sexual ideology of, 176, 184–​87
normative masculine subject of, 181–​85,
186–​88, 234n.5
objectification and, 186–86, 187
phenomenology, model of, 79–​80
Sartre, critique of, 187
sexuality, theory of, 175–​78, 179–​84, 189n.3
subjectivity in, 187–​88
visual metaphors in, 186–​87, 189n.3
metaphors, 227–​29
embodiment and, 14
inaccurate modeling, 228–​29
of speaking surfaces, 221–​22, 223–​28, 229–​
33, 234n.3, 234n.4
visual, 186–​87, 189n.3, 228, 234n.7
metaphysics
dualism, 2, 15–​18, 87, 126, 156, 157–​58, 161–​
63, 167, 190–​91, 207–​8, 239, 260
neutral monism, 20, 331–​32, 337–​39, 340–​
43, 343n.8
new materialisms, 259–​60, 272–​73, 289
panpsychism, 4, 273–​79, 281–​82, 285–​88,
290nn.6–​7, 291n.16, 291n.17, 337–​38, 339
 Index 391

physicalism, 2, 15–​16, 17–​18, 27n.37, 239–​45, Nagel, Thomas, 10, 228, 239, 263–​64, 265–​66
246–​48, 253n.7, 256–​59 mental attribution and, 277–​78
of the self, 355 Narayan, Uma, 19–​20, 267
Meyers, Diana Tietjens, 9, 11, 12, 203, 204–​5 narrativism, 331
Michie, Helena, 224 naturalism, 13–​15
Millikan, Ruth Garrett, 1, 12–​13, 75–​76, 84n.11 defined, 12–​13
consumer account of meaning, 71, 78–​80 desire and, 13–14, 175
derived function, 215–​16 feminist critiques of, 13, 26n.32, 80, 125
teleosemantic theory of, 8, 77–​81, 83, 84n.10 feminist philosophy of mind and, 23
Mills, Charles W., 22 gender and, 13
mind normativity and, 12–​13
ableism and, 26n.22 phenomenology and, 13–14, 26n.34
agency and, 260–​61 philosophy of mind and, 12–​15, 26n.29,
class and, 6–7 26nn.30–​31
embeddedness of, 190 versus physicalism, 27n.37
embodiment of, 190, 207–​8 sex and, 13–​14, 26n.32
extended mind hypothesis, 342, 343n.6 sexual difference and, 26n.34
gender&race& and, 7–​8, 21–​22 sexuality and, 175–​76, 177–​78, 179–​81
masculinity and, 156–57, 164–​65, 167, 315 Neisser, Ulrich, 124–​25
materialism and, 256 neuroscience, 2–​3
other minds, problem of, 2, 7–​9, 86–​87, 272–​ borderline personality disorder and, 208,
73, 289–​90 209, 211–​13
personhood and, 86 brain imagery in, 257
racialization of, 7–​8 feminist analysis and, 14
mind-​body dualism, 2, 15–​18, 87, 239, 260 gender and, 210
ableism and, 16 ontology of, 211–​12
character and, 161–​63 See also cognitive neuroscience (CNS)
colonialism and, 16 neutral monism, 20
embodiment and, 207–​8 memory and, 331–​32, 337–​39, 340–​
enactivist critique of, 190–​91 42, 343n.8
feminist critiques of, 126, 190–91, 239 panpsychism and, 331, 337
gender and, 11–​12, 156, 167 relational model of memory and, 342–​43
heterosexism and, 16 new materialisms, 259, 272–​73, 289
personal identity and, 157–​58 causation and, 259–​60
psychological continuity and, 163 Newtonian physics, 259
racism and, 16 causality, 283–​84, 286–​87
speciesism and, 16 mental attribution and, 274
mindfulness, 20–​21 panpsychism and, 275
loving attention and, 362, 372 Ngo, Helen, 22
mindreading, 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 234n.3
misrecognition, 90 Nissim-​Sabat, Marilyn, 124–​25
Moi, Toril, 231 Noë, Alva, 24n.1, 85
Montague, P. Read, 215 Noland, Carrie, 224
Moore, G. E., 251–​52 Noonan, Harold, 158, 159, 165–​66
Moreno, Alvaro, 194 normativity
Mortimer-​Sandilands, Catriona, 334–​35, 360n.5 cognitive ontology and, 208
Morton, Adam, 335–​36 feminist philosophy of mind and, 23
motherhood, 315–​16, 359–​60 gender and, 50–​51
heteronormativity and, 347–​48 gender identity and, 50–​51
identity and, 353–​54 heteronormativity, 176
Mothers of the Movement, 347–​48 sexuality and, 80, 175–76, 178, 181–​84
Moulton, Janice, 264–​65, 269n.5 norms
Murdoch, Iris, 363, 364, 367–​69, 375n.4, sex and gender, 232–​33
375n.6, 375n.9 Nussbaum, Martha, 139, 349–​51
392 Index

objectification, 273, 274 Patrul Rinpoche, 366, 373–​74, 375n.2

hypermateriality and, 282–​85, 286–​ Pearsall, Marilyn, 16–​17, 77
87, 288–​89 Pepperberg, Irene, 60–​61
Merleau-​Ponty and, 185–​86, 187 perception, 185–86, 278, 281–82, 338–39, 368
sexuality and, 185–​86, 187 Black bodies and, 89, 92, 96
subjectivity and, 314, 321 emotion and, 19
of victims of oppression, 141, 144 empathy and, 90, 95–97, 204
objectivity, 228 memory and, 336, 340
Ohunumo, Reiko, 351 misogyny in, 181–84
Olson, Eric, 169n.10 moral perception, 11, 362, 364, 367
ontology racism and, 11, 22
of agency, 261 of sex and gender, 303
of disorder, 123 See also arrogant perception; ethics of
explanation and, 256–​59 perception; loving perception
feminist, 105 performance
of machines, 4, 282–​83 gender performativity, 190–​91, 199–​200, 201,
of neuroscience, 211–​12 204, 227
of physicalism, 243 Perry, John, 334–​35
of self, 9, 355 Perry, Ralph, 338
of sex and gender, 14 personal identity, 167, 323–24
of sexual difference, 259 bodily continuity and, 157–​58, 161–​62
of the tactile, 187 character, 158–​59, 163–​67
physical sciences and, 239 embodiment and, 157, 158
psychological, 248, 250 marginalization of the feminine, 156, 157–​58
Ortega, Mariana, 9, 269n.4 masculinity and,158, 168
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ, 5 memory and, 159–​60
psychological continuity and, 157–​67, 168,
pain, 73–​74, 89–​90, 97 169n.10
Black pain, 95–​97 rape and, 313, 316–18
Painter, Nell Irvin, 25n.14 sexual identity and, 165–​67, 168
panpsychism, 4 social identity and, 167–​68
Cavendishian, 273–​75, 278–​79, 281–​82, 285–​ See also self; gender identity; identity
88, 290nn.6–​7, 291n.16, 291n.17 personhood
defined, 274 agency and, 11
mental attribution and, 273–​74, 286–​87 agentic bias in, 141
neutral monism and, 331, 337 embodiment and, 126–27, 167
physicalist, 17–​18, 274–​75, 277 marginalization of the feminine, 158
Russellian, 273–​75, 277–​79, 281, 282, 286–​ masculine conception of, 158
88, 337–​38, 339 mind, construction of, and, 86, 93
Pappas, Nickolas, 76 psychological continuity and, 11–​12
Parfit, Derek, 157–​58, 319–​20, 326n.14, relational notion of, 333
334–​35 sexual difference and, 167
teletransporter problem, 24n.5 phenomenology, 1, 134n.4
Parnas, Josef, 134n.4 of action, 230–​31
passivity, 11, 140, 142–​44, 146, 152 agency in, 231–​33
activity/​passivity binary, 139–​41, 142–​ animal consciousness and, 267–​68
44, 146 attribution of mind and, 275–​76
agentic self and, 141, 142–​44, 145, 146–​ embodiment of sex and gender,
49, 151–​52 221, 222–​27
autonomy and, 152 empirical evidence in, 269n.6
victims and, 144–​46 naturalism and, 13–​14
patriarchy, 126, 127, 211, 217, 229, 365 sex/​gender dichotomy and, 221
cognitive neuroscience and, 14 sexuality and, 15, 176–78, 181–​87
philosophy and, 263 social construction and, 26n.34, 221–24
 Index 393

philosophy of language, 12 Prinz, Jesse, 19

causal theory of reference, 72–​75, 76 Prokhovnik, Raia, 353–​54
description theory, 72 Proudfoot, Diane, 67n.5
See also metaphors Proust, Marcel, 317
philosophy of mind psychiatry
Buddhist, 363 mental disorder in, 123–​24
consciousness and, 239 psychoanalytic theory
defined, 2 sexuality in, 177–​78
externalism in, 70–​71 psychology
feminism and, 70–71, 255–56 commonsense, 244–​47, 251–​52, 258
feminist critiques of, 70 moral psychology, 357–​58, 362, 367–​68, 369–​
feminist epistemology and, 268 70, 371–​74, 375n.12
feminist philosophy and, 1–​3, 156, 228 phenomena of, 248
individualism and, 70, 245 Putnam, Hilary, 72–​73, 74–​76, 77–​78,
masculinist values of, 265–​66 253nn.7–8
naturalism and, 12–​15 externalism of, 79, 83
personal identity and, 9, 10, 11, 157, 158, 323 individualism, critique of, 3
physicalism and, 241–​42 Twin Earth thought experiment, 24n.5,
sex/​gender dichotomy and, 221 72–​73, 75
philosophy of psychiatry
disorder in, 129–​30 Quartz, Steven R., 215
philosophy of race Quijano, Aníbal, 279–​80, 283
attribution of mind and, 273, 275–​76 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 251, 253n.9
philosophy of science, 242 Quinton, Anthony, 158–59, 162, 165–​66
feminist philosophy and, 70–​71
physicalism, 2, 15 race, 50, 306
consciousness and, 15–​16 empathy and, 8–​9
eliminativism, 15, 247–​48 enactivism and, 198
experience and, 15–​16 externalism and, 75
feminist critiques of, 16, 239–40 mental attribution and, 272
versus naturalism, 27n.37 racial nonbeing, 275–​77, 278–​80, 291n.9
ontology of, 243 racialization
physicalist panpsychism, 17–​18, 274–​75, 277 dehumanization and, 280
as reductive, 256–​59 of mind, 7–​8
supervenient theories, 243–​45, 246–​48, 253n.6 racism
Piper, Mark, 9, 22 abuse and, 107
Pitts-​Taylor, Victoria, 208 antiblack, 276–​77
Plato, 315, 316 Black minds and, 8–​9, 86
playfulness embodied racism, 203
agonistic, 117–​19, 120, 122n.6 identification and, 109–​10
openness and, 119–​20, 121 mind-​body dualism and, 16
resistance and, 122n.7 as norm, 81
“world”–​traveling and, 112, 114, 116–​21, perception and, 11, 22
121n.3, 370–​71 self-​empathy and, 97–​98
Plumwood, Val, 282–​83, 286–​87 Radden, Jennifer, 10, 11, 12, 132–​33
Popper, Ben, 257 Rankin, John, 89–​90, 94, 95–​97
Post, John F., 246–​47 rape
posthumanism, 22–​23, 272–​73 Black women’s minds and, 86–​87
post-​traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 313–​ memory and, 19, 159–​60, 322
14, 316–​17 personal identity and, 313, 316–​18
Potter, Susan Nyquist, 210–​11 survivors, 313, 320, 323–25, 327n.15
praxis See also violence
feminist, 263, 269n.4 Rashed, Mohammed A., 130–​31
Marxist, 260 Rawls, John, 144
394 Index

Reader, Soran, 11, 139 Segev, Tom, 321

on agentic bias, 141 self, 9–​12
on “enduring” violence, 145 agency and, 9
on passivity/patiency, 140, 142–​44, 146, 152 the body and, 242
on suffering, 142, 145, 149, 153n.2 constructions of, 112–​14, 122n.5
Regan, Tom, 94 disembodied, 355
relational self, 18–​19, 20, 124, 261, 313, 314–​15, as embedded, 127
321, 324, 326n.3, 326n.6, 358–​60 embodied, 315–​19, 354, 355, 360n.5
grief and, 349–51 emotions and, 352–​53
violence and, 348, 355, 358–59 empathy and, 323–​24
representation, mental, 19, 71, 78–​79, 176–​77, feminist theories of, 9–12, 314–15
303–​4, 330–​31, 335–​36, 339 forgiveness and, 357–​59
representationalism, 340, 342–​43 grief and, 347, 348–​51
representationism, 3 identity and, 9
Rice, Taji, 88 individualism and, 314–​15
Rice, Tamir, 88 maternal selfhood, 347–​48
Rippon, Gina, 22 mental disorder and, 133
Roelofs, Luke, 281, 285 metaphysical views of, 314–​15, 355
Rohrbach, Augusta, 22 as narrative, 319–​23
Root, Michael, 248, 252n.10 ontology of, 9, 355
Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, 19 poststructuralist views of, 314–​15, 326n.5
Rosch, Eleanor, 191–​92 self-​consciousness, 2, 7, 9, 88, 202, 264
Ruddick, Sara, 315 sense of self, 332–​33
on motherhood, 315–16, 326n.8 versus subject, 340
Ruiz-​Mirazo, Kepa, 194 torture and, 229
Russell, Bertrand, 274–​75, 289, 290n.6 trauma and, 313–​15, 316–​26
belief-​feelings, 340–​41, 343–​44nn.12–​13 See also agentic self; personal identity;
on expectations, 341, 344n.14 relational self; self-concept
neutral monism of, 20, 331, 332, 337–39, self-​concept, 44–​46, 47, 48–​49, 52
340–43, 343n.8 first-​person perspective and, 44–​46, 47,
panpsychism of, 337–​38, 339 48–​50, 52
See also panpsychism gender and, 41, 49
Russell, Denise, 126 semantic contagion, 20, 331, 332, 336–​37, 342
Russo, Mary, 222–​23 Semon, Richard, 340–​41
Ryle, Gilbert, 15, 234n.8, 300–​1 sex
as binary, 49, 58, 64, 67–68n.10, 259, 305
Śāntideva, 366 definitions of, 41–​43, 295
Sartre, Jean-​Paul versus gender, 13, 41–​43, 67n.2, 259,
on the body, 179 295–​96
theory of consciousness, 7 indeterminacy of, 42
Sass, Louis, 134n.4 intelligence and, 64–​66
Saul, Jennifer, 74–​75, 84n.7, 267 Turing test, 8, 54
Scheman, Naomi, 19–​20, 70, 77, 84n.3, sexism, 5, 70, 125, 262, 276
249, 262 perception and, 22
individualism, critique of, 3, 17, 76–77, reason and, 156
128, 315 sexual difference, 152, 167
physicalism, critique of, 17, 18, 256–​59 phenomenology and, 26n.34
Scherer, Klaus R., 19 See also sex
Scherer, Migael, 313 sexuality
Schetchman, Marya, 334–​36, 343n.3 desire and, 175, 181, 185–​87
Schneider, Susan, 22–​23 drives and, 176–​78
Seager, William, 281 intersubjectivity and, 179
Searle, John, 66 masculinity and, 181–​85, 186–​87
 Index 395

naturalism and, 175–​76, 177–​78, 179–​81 subjectivity

normativity and, 80, 175–​76, 181–​84 embodiment and, 204–​5
phenomenology and, 15, 176–78, 181–​87 enactivism and, 204–​5
as possibility, 177, 179 gender and, 187–​88
in psychoanalytic theory, 177–​78 in Merleau-​Ponty, 187–88
sexual orientations, 18, 294–​95 maternal subjectivity, 348, 359
behaviorism and, 294, 296, 300–​1 objectification and, 314, 321
desire and, 294, 301–5, 307, 308n.4 Sullivan, Shannon, 22
enactivism and, 198 supervenience, 15, 243
sex-​gender and, 295–​96 global, 246–​48
sexual preference and, 302–​5, 307 nonreductive, 244–​45
structural view of, 294, 306 Sutton, John, 343n.6
transgender and, 306, 308n.5
See also dispositionalism Tamir, Yael, 321
Shapiro, Lawrence A., 343n.8 Tappolet, Christine, 19
Shay, Jonathan, 313, 317, 321, 326n.4 Taylor, Charles, 153n.2
Shoemaker, Sydney, 10, 157–​58, Taylor, Shelley E., 153n.13
326n.11, 334–​35 Terr, Lenore, 318
Showalter, Elaine, 126 Thagard, Paul, 19, 94
Shrage, Laurie, 22 Thompson, Evan, 24n.1, 191–​92, 193, 194–​96,
Siderits, Mark, 24n.1 198–​99, 202
Siegel, Susanna, 24n.1 Thornton, Tim, 213–​14
Siewert, Charles, 24n.1 Timini, Sami, 133n.3
Simons, Margaret A., 26n.24 torture
Snowdon, Paul, 169n.10 self and, 160, 318, 320
social change, 16, 204 Traiger, Saul, 57, 58
social cognition, 3, 133n.2 transgender
social construction, 13, 125, 157, 211 gender identity and sex, 42, 50, 222–​23
embodiment and, 221, 222–​27, 234n.1 feminist philosophy of mind and, 22–​23
phenomenology and, 26n.34, 221–24 sexual orientation and, 306, 308n.5
sexual difference and, 26n.34 trans studies, 2–​3
sociality trauma, 10
enactive analysis of, 190–​91 defined, 313–​14
speciesism embodiment and, 319
mind-​body dualism and, 16 memory and, 18–​21, 159–​60, 163, 164,
Spillers, Hortense J., 5 169n.8, 317, 319–​20, 321, 330–​32, 334, 335
on Black fungibility, 91 psychological responses to, 313–​14
Spinoza, Baruch, 290n.6 self and, 313–​15, 316–​26
Stanbury, Sarah, 224 Truth, Sojourner, 4, 5, 25n.14
Stapleton, Mog, 198–​99, 202 Tschacher, Wolfgang, 124–​25
Stein, Edward, 294, 295–​96 Tuana, Nancy, 22, 264–​65
on dispositionalism, 296–​97, 301–​2 Tulving, Endel, 19
on sexual desire, 302–​3 Turing, Alan, 54
Stenghellini, Giovanni, 134n.4 Turing test, 8
stereotypes critiques of, 63, 65, 66–67, 68n.14
enacted, 203 man/​woman imitation game, 54–​57, 60, 63,
of victims, 145–46 64, 66–​67, 68n.11, 68n.15
of women, 48, 109, 132, 139 sex analogy in, 66–​67
Turing test and, 64–​66 as sex-​differentiation test, 56–​60, 61–​63
Sterrett, Susan G., 58 as species-​differentiation test, 55–​56, 57–​60,
Stoller, Robert, 67n.2 61–​63, 67n.5
Strawson, Galen, 10, 273–​74, 277–​78, 281
Strawson, Peter, 357–​58 Ussher, Jane M., 126
396 Index

Varela, Francisco, 191–​92 Wilson, Darren, 89

Vasilyeva, Nadya, 21–​22 Wilson, Robert, 245
Velleman, David, 152 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 234n.8
Veltman, Andrea, 9, 22 on public language, 45, 46, 48
Vines, Gail, 128–​29 Wittig, Monique, 224
violence Wolff, Janet, 122n.6, 224
Black bodies and, 87–​88, 89, 91–92, 284 Womanist philosophy, 369
colonialism and, 87, 284 Women of Color
domestic, 151 as coalition, 105, 110–11, 121
relational self and, 348, 355, 358–59 women of color feminisms, 1
sexual, 313, 318 Wooglar, Steve, 13
See also rape “world”–​traveling, 11, 105–​6, 111–​15,
vulnerability, 139–​40, 141–​42 202–​3
identification and, 111–​12, 120–​21
Wagner, Jenny, 207 loving attention and, 370–​71
Walker, Alice, 369 defined, 114–​15
Walker, Margaret, 143, 315–​16, 319, 326n.9 playfulness and, 112, 114, 116–​21,
Wedgwood, Ralph, 214 121n.3, 370–​71
Weheliye, Alexander G., 22–​23 resistance and, 121, 122n.9
Weil, Simone, 364, 375n.4 of Women of Color, 110–11, 121
Werning, Markus, 19 “worlds”
white fungibility, 88, 92–​93, 100n.5 being at ease in, 115–​17
white empathy and, 98–​100 construction of self, 113–​14, 116–​17, 119–​
white minds and, 94 20, 122n.5
See also Black fungibility meanings of, 112–​14
whiteness, 9, 81–​83, 279–​80 Wright, Richard, 24n.2
citizenship and, 70, 81–​82 Wynter, Sylvia, 276–​77
humanity and, 86, 100n.4 on dehumanization, 279–​80
immigration and, 70, 80–​82
white supremacy Yancy, George, 365, 366
Black minds and, 86–​87, 91–92, 277 Yergeau, Melanie, 26n.22
Wiggins, David, 157–​58 Young, Iris Marion, 203, 223, 231
Wilkerson, William, 294
Williams, Bernard, 157–​58, 164, 165–​66, 228, Zahavi, Dan, 10, 24n.1, 88, 95, 96–​97, 353
326n.7, 326n.11 Zhu, Jing, 19